A limited police action maybe...
By use of military force.
...a kenitic military campaign, a protracted counter-insurgency...
Oh, semantics...
...a meals on wheels humanitarian venture...
A...what? You call running into their country, forcibly toppling their government, and plunging their country into anarchy, and deigning to stick around to help pick up the pieces WHAT now?! It's a humanitarian venture like the incarceration of the Japanese around WWII was assisting them to find housing.
...a struggle for hearts and minds...
Flat out bullshit.
a misguided feel-good demonstration of tolerating the intollerable...
Wat.
...whatever it is we are doing in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya - it is most definately not war.
Fine, it's waving your dicks around, reminding the world your the biggest, baddest sonuvabitch in the sandbox, flailing wildly, trying to reassert yourselves. Happy?
If we were at war then by October 2001 every radical Muslim would be dead or staggering around on radioactive deserts of molten glass like nomadic zombies.
Because the world would just stand by and watch a country nuke the fuck out of another, reducing it to a nuclear wasteland.
Gas would be $1.05 at the pump...
And how is this? You just nuked the biggest oil producers in the world, incinerating a large chunk of the reserves, and rendering the balance inaccessible, what with the nuclear fallout and shit like that. People tend to avoid going into places like that. Enjoy watching the price of gas climb and climb and climb.
...unemployment would be non-existent...
Because what? You'll have people over there cleaning up the environmental nightmare you would have created?
...and an army of Christion missionaries would be bringing a billion lost souls to Jesus Christ throughout the middle east.
What souls?! Here's the funny thing about nukes. THEY KILL PEOPLE! Most victims? Vaporized on the spot. They would be the lucky bastards. Then there would be the ones who would be left to die of nuclear poisoning. I'm sure they'll be more than happy to hear your message of peace and love as they're dying of...lessee...radiation burns? Cancer? Just to name the big two?
We would be experiencing a new baby boom of optimism in America instead of the government shutting down because one side wants to use tax dollars to fund poet cowboys and killing unborn children.
*Sigh* The arts are just as important part of any culture as anything else. Your military budget? About 20% of your budget, if Wikipedia is to be believed. Anything that would have been proposed for these "cowboy poets and baby-killers?" Would barely put a dent in that. Oh, and your outrage in aborting children while getting a hard on over the prospect of nuclear war is laughable, and shows a massive logical disconnect.