Hiding behind civilians only endangers those civilians. Harsh of me to say, but at this point, if those civilians don't want to be targets due to terrorists using them as shields, they should DO SOMETHING about those terrorists...being as they are their neighbors, family members, etc.
Americans, as a civilized people, do not want to see innocent civilians killed in the course of fighting the enemy, any more than Americans or British during World War II, being civilized people, wanted to see Germans and Japanese civilians killed then. At the same time, though, no nation is obliged to let its sworn enemies hide among civilians, and plan attacks from its safe haven at its leisure.
You make a good point. In the cities in Syria and Iraq where the jihadists are sheltering, the inhabitants, so far at least, have no strong motive to turn against them. I am convinced many of them sympathize with these bastards to some extent, and that some are helping them. I don't hold out much hope this President will do anything that is likely to change that situation.
But the next one might, and I think one effective way to motivate these people would be to warn them publicly that the U.S. expects them to kill or turn out the jihadists living amongst them--and that if they do not, the U.S. is prepared to use heavy bombers to destroy every target it has good reason to believe serves the jihadists--offices, communications centers, heavy weapons, vehicles, storehouses, training camps, etc.--located anywhere in or near any city under their control. Just convincing the people in these cities that this country will not hesitate, if necessary, to take action that would surely cause many of them to be killed might provide the threat needed to make that action
unnecessary.
Once these people were deprived of the cover of cities, it's hard to see how they could hope to hold onto the roads leading to those cities, which are another important feature that has come under their control. When so few people are spread out so far, their hold on the areas they have infested cannot be very strong. They are all together only ten or twenty thousand irregular infantry with second-rate training and a smattering of captured heavy weapons they don't know how to use very well.
That means they almost certainly could not survive sustained bombing--but they can hold out pretty well against the half-hearted kind of force Mr. Obama has applied so far. And just by letting them hold out, the U.S. is foolishly--and dangerously--handing them a psychological victory that enhances their prestige.
