You can't defeat them period - they are everywhere, in our own countries, many of them born and raised citizens, it's impossible for any country to keep tabs on every malcontent and easy enough for those malcontents to get explosives to put on their bodies and walk into a mall, stadium, busy street and blow themselves up and take hundreds with them. If there's 2,000 of them in a country like the US or England, you work your ass off and spend billions rooting out 3/4's of them, that leaves 500 of them, how many did it take in total to pull off the Paris attacks? 20?
You can reclaim lands they've taken in Iraq and Syria but that does nothing to stop the terror attacks in other countries. These people aren't the devout Muslims they claim to be, they are socially maladjusted psychopaths using a religious cause as cover and a recruiting tool. We underestimated them, that they now are in control of large parts of Syria and Iraq is something nobody thought them capable of.
We're stuck with this problem, even dropping a nuke on the Middle East would do nothing.
And that was the lesson of Vietnam, Ho Chi Min warned that the Vietnamese would never give up, they had nowhere to go, it was their home and you could bomb it until there was nobody left but they weren't going to give up. Wars only end when one or both sides want to stop the pain and go back to their normal lives. When your normal life is really shitty there's no reason to surrender or negotiate peace.
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