One of President Ronald Reagan's most effective lines in his debates was, "well, there you go again".

With all the saber rattling to go back to war, I hear those words echoing throughout the debate on how to stop ISIS.

A recent appearance by Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent chills down my spine, although I was not surprised.

"If we reach the point where I believe our advisers should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific ISIL targets, I'll recommend that to the president,"

Let's be clear. Our young men and women will be dying in the desert and small towns across the Middle East before we ring in the New Year. Of course, our enemy, ISIL, will punctuate these deaths with high definition beheadings of our troops. You can bet on that.

In June of 2011, I wrote a guest commentary published in the Day about Pfc. Eric D. Soufrine from Woodbridge. Pfc. Soufrine was 20 when he lost his life in Afghanistan for a government ruled by drug lords and corrupt political leaders who took our billions of dollars in aid and placed it in Swiss bank accounts.

Eric died an honorable man answering the call of his country.

As we march again to war we need to understand it is the Eric who will die.

Our leaders need to ask very clear questions. What is the mission for the next Eric? What does success look like? Who is his enemy? Who are his allies? How will we support Eric and his brothers and sisters when they come home? How's that investigation of the appalling treatment of our veterans going at the Veterans Administration? Don't hold your breath.

President Obama is the Commander in Chief. This is his decision; but it is Congress that can declare war. The cowards in Congress won't even debate a war resolution and have an up or down vote. They pass incremental funding issues as they just did to send millions of dollars to the "Free Syrian Army".

We don't know who the FSA is, what they will do with the money, or the weapons. Type into Google "FSA Executes Loyalists." That is with whom we are allied, your tax dollars at work.

Let me be clear. I know there are no good options. The Middle East is a caldron of religious and ethnic hatreds, the historical subjugation of colonial rule with a large dose of abject poverty. It is not a challenge with a solution. It must be managed.

That is why we need to be smarter and more deliberate than ever before. We must not go down the same path of inching day by day into what we know best - war.

Look at the results in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We must be more honest and direct with our "allies" our "enemies" and ourselves.

Strategies may need to be employed that will infringe on our personal freedoms, even more than they do now. We may need to make extremely aggressive and violent acts of war to blunt ISIL and its allies. We also may need to do absolutely nothing but watch very carefully and wait. All the while preparing for any possible scenario.

What if ISIL hijacks a plane and drives it into the White House? What would we do? Perhaps ISIL or some other group uses a virus to infect as many people as they can?

Let's be real. The people we are fighting blow themselves up. Why wouldn't they get an army of martyrs infect them with a deadly virus and send them forth?

We can't continue to replay the same incremental steps to war. There are so many smart people here and across the world. We need to think outside the box and understand the challenges before us are not ones that lend themselves to solutions. The best we can do is manage these challenges.

That management needs to be clear, honest and direct.

History has shown, as brave and honorable as Pfc Eric Soufrine was, it is simply unfair to place on a 20-year-old the responsibility of solving these complex and intractable challenges.

A veteran of numerous local, state and federal political campaigns, Ben Davol was formerly a columnist for The Day and still an occasional contributor. He lives in Stonington.