There’s no better way to ring in the New Year than having a few drinks (shots, anyone?) and reflecting on the past year. To help you out, Correct The Record has prepared a series of shots and chasers that highlight the GOP presidential contenders’ yugely out-of-touch and extremely out-of-date year.
Sit back and enjoy. Next up is Ted Cruz.
SHOT:
Ted Cruz: “We will utterly destroy them [ISIS]. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion.” “‘If I am elected president, we will utterly destroy ISIS,’ the Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate told reporters. ‘We won’t weaken them. We won’t degrade them. We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. We will arm the Kurds. We will do everything necessary so that every militant on the face of the earth will know if you go and join ISIS, if you wage jihad and declare war on America, you are signing your death warrant.’” [Washington Post, 12/5/15]
Asked if his carpet bombing campaign would include bombing the ISIS capital Raqqa and killing civilians, Cruz hedged, said he would “carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city.” “BLITZER: Thank you. To be clear, Senator Cruz, would you carpet bomb Raqqa, the ISIS capital, where there are a lot of civilians, yes or no? CRUZ: You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops. You use air power directed — and you have embedded special forces to direction the air power. But the object isn’t to level a city. The object is to kill the ISIS terrorists.” [Republican Primary Debate, 12/15/15]
CHASER:
Daily Beast: “There’s no such thing as a precise, narrowly targeted carpet-bombing campaign.” “The architects of that Gulf War effort, which featured the first major use of precision-guided bombs, would probably disagree that it was was ‘saturation’ or ‘carpet’ bombing. And according to the International Criminal Court, war crimes include ‘intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population.’ Cruz said the objective would be to kill members of ISIS, not civilians, but there’s no such thing as a precise, narrowly targeted carpet-bombing campaign. The tactic, which began in the Spanish Civil War and flowered fully in World War II, is to drop thousands of munitions on a single area—and flatten in. It is the opposite of precise.” [Daily Beast, 12/15/15]
New York Times: “In Syria and Iraq, mass bombing would kill hundreds of innocent civilians and fuel radicalization.” “Mr. Cruz is a lawyer and a foreign-policy neophyte. Anyone with any understanding of military strategy knows that ‘carpet-bombing’ is a term used by amateurs trying to sound tough. Indiscriminate bombing has never been a military strategy, and it would be senseless in an age of ‘smart’ weaponry and precise targeting. In Syria and Iraq, mass bombing would kill hundreds of innocent civilians and fuel radicalization. That’s why military leaders utter the term ‘carpet-bomb’ only while laughing at Mr. Cruz.” [New York Times editorial, 12/11/15]
Vox: “To be clear — this is totally incoherent. The term ‘carpet bombing’ means mass unguided bombing in populated areas.” “To be clear — this is totally incoherent. The term ‘carpet bombing’ means mass unguided bombing in populated areas; that is not what happened in the Gulf War. Moreover, in the Gulf War the United States was fighting an actual military as opposed to a terrorist group pretending to be a government. ISIS has adapted to the US military campaign in a way that forces us to limit strikes if we don’t want significant civilian casualties.” [Vox, 12/15/15]