During Tuesday night’s debate, Republican presidential frontrunner Ben Carson — who has admitted there are many policies he doesn’t understand — proved how little he knows about foreign policy.
In response to a question about terrorist threats in the United States and President Barack Obama’s decision to put special forces on the ground in Syria, Carson outlined his incoherent plan to defeat the Islamic State.
“Putting the special ops people in there is better than not having them there because they — that’s why they’re called special ops. They’re actually able to guide some of the other things that we’re doing there, and what we have to recognize is that Putin is trying to really spread his influence throughout the Middle East.
This is going to be his base and we have to oppose him there and in an effective way. We also must recognize it’s a very complex place. You know the Chinese are there as well as the Russians, and you have all kinds of factions there. What we’ve been doing so far is very ineffective.
But we can’t give up ground right there. But we have to look at this on a much more global scale. We’re talking about global jihadists, and their desire is to destroy us and to destroy our way of life. So we have to be saying, how do we make them look like losers? That’s the way they’re able to gather a lot of influence, and I think in order to make them look like losers, we have to destroy their caliphate. And you look for the easiest place to do that. It would be in Iraq, outside of Anbar. In Iraq there’s a big energy field. Take that from them, take all of that land from them. We could do that, i believe, fairly easily, I’ve learned from talking to several generals, and you move on from there, but you have to continue to face them because our goal is not to contain them but to destroy them before they destroy us.”
Carson has previously said that the United States should lead the fight against the Islamic State because “we have an extremely capable military.” In September, he called for driving ISIS out of Iraq and into Syria to allow the terrorist group to focus its attention on ousting President Bashar Assad. “Let them fight each other,” he said.