Politics are politics, but there are serious dangers in making claims about the ability to defeat terrorism in general – and ISIS in particular. One of the most critical limits to the way both Democratic and Republican Administrations have fought the “war” on terrorism is that they have treated it largely as a military struggle against individual terrorist and extremist movements, rather than as a broader campaign to deal with a range of threats that cannot be defeated without major successes against a wide range of constantly changing movements and without major efforts to reduce the causes of terrorism…