One can almost see the Islamic State’s top ideologues and propagandists celebrating. And why not? Muslims the world over, which Isis views (wrongly) as a sea of potential recruits, could be forgiven for viewing the Republican rhetoric as a declaration of holy war against their co-religionists.
They do not want want the unrestrained, city-flattening, mechanized war of which Western civilization is capable; they want our current state of "half-war" to continue until the West (the U.S. especially) runs out of money and willpower, as they were trained to do in order to defeat the U.S.S.R.