Is there a chance that the West is better off with Isis battling away in Syria and Iraq?

No.
Plus, how can anybody believe that nonsense?
Folks who would otherwise be busy blowing us up… are not distracted. They are merely waiting.
When ISIS is concentrated in one spot and ripe for extermination, the morally confused West will, based on passed performance, probably do nothing.
For practical reasons, this is because the West has no money, and as a moral issue, because they are confused about the notion of “morally correct”.
Whatever you think about yourself, and your good intentions,all the Muslim Brotherhood (and their branch organizations like ISIS, al Qaeda etc) wants in their wildest dreams is to slice off your head simply because you are a Westerner.
So, no.
You are engaging in a hopeful daydream.
I have been there. They are like zombies. They have no conscience nor soul.
This nightmare will not end until the enlightened West establishes objective moral standards and properly decides what to do about mindless zealots.

Well there are clearly difficulties involved with slicing off my head while everyone’s over there slicing the heads off fellow (though apostate) Muslims.

Keep reassuring yourself. It’s healthy in the short term.

No. The West would be better off if Iraq had not been turned into a free-for-all playground for extremists. The US should have left well enough alone.

Barring that, we should have gone in with sufficient force to maintain order, but the Army Chief of Staff was fired for saying that.

The last hope would have been dividing the country into three parts, Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurd. But Joe Biden was almost alone in saying that.

Maybe. Iran wants Hezbollah (in Lebanon) who normally is shooting rockets at Israel, to instead turn its rockets towards Syria, in hopes of damaging ISIS, which seems to be in danger of overrunning Syria and deposing Assad. (Remember that the US wanted to gt rid of Assad a couple of years ago, but .. my, how things change.)

So if Israel is feeling less threatened by Hesbollah, that tends to lower tensions in general. Frankly, on this issue, Israel, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Iran all agree.

But nothing in the middle east can be considered stable, so I wouldn’t expect any weird confluence of interests like this to last very long.

No. Isolationism doesn’t work. We found that out in WWII.

Just because there primary CURRENT activity is an ocean away from us doesn’t mean that they can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

I’m quite certain that there are all sorts of plans being hatched to cause as much chaos as possible over here. But it’s not necessarily that easy.

But, their media campaign is quite sophisticated and successful at recruiting all sorts of disgruntled ignorant youth. The amount of responses generated and folks migrating over there is surprisingly high. Obviously, one of their primary reasons for recruiting Westerners is to thoroughly indoctrinate them and send them back to wreak whatever havoc they can get away with.

In the Internet age, distances shrink. It’s a surprisingly small small world (and not always in a good way) nowadays.

It’s almost as if the possibility for terrorism didn’t exist before ISIS. It’s almost like if we destroyed this one group then terrorism would, somehow, magically disappear and never be an issue again.