Recommended: What ISIS Really Wants

The Atlantic Monthly has an article every American, especially every American politician, and certainly our President, ought to read. It is entitled What ISIS Really Wants, and it reaffirms not only that ISIS really is a religiously-motivated movement, but details exactly what that religious vision is.  We will never succeed in overcoming the medieval brutality of ISIS until we understand exactly what it is that motivates people to join and give their very lives to such a movement, because ISIS needs to be defeated in a battle of ideas - military force alone simply isn't going to do it.

And why does ISIS need to be defeated so urgently?  Because its ideology supports, indeed encourages, mass slaughter of unbelievers by any means available - including nuclear and biological means if they ever got such weapons into their hands.  So they are indeed an existential threat to the rest of us, even here in America.