We noticed. We've noticed the entire Syrian conflict from the start. It isn't exactly obscure. It's been in the news since it started.

How long of war is long enough? Ten years didn't do it, would twenty years work? Do we need to go for a half-century? How many states do we need to invade in this adventure? It is easy to say that all we have to do is do bad things to bad people, but it would be dishonest to say that it is that easy. In a situation like this, where you are already dealing with massive swaths of village-dwelling Sunni's who sympathize more with the terrorist organizations than they do with westerners, you have a hard time distinguishing who is bad and who is good. When our advisers seem incapable of working with the local culture to build a government that will succeed, how much money and blood do we need to be willing to pour into an inevitable failure of a government before we accept that "Fooled me once, shame on you. Fooled me twice, shame on me."? 

So that is the question. We've done police actions before and they don't seem to work in these circumstances, so do we go total war on ISIS? Total war by it's definition means doing bad things to innocents just as much as combatants, so do we want to go down that road? Especially when violence breeds more terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. I'm definitely not saying we can talk this out with ISIS, and I don't think we should ignore the problem all together, but we cannot make a move that contradicts all of the people who actually live there. All that will do is increase western military job security at the expense of a lot of lives on both sides. If we are going to fix this thing, we have to get the other Muslim nations more involved in fixing this problem, which is a problem within itself.