Ted Cruz never says anything good just once — when he finds a line or a
joke that gets applause, he repeats it over and over. And one of his big
crowd-pleasers at the moment is this little ditty
about the Islamic State: "We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion. I
don't know if sand can glow in the dark, but we're going to find out!"
Does Cruz actually want to drop nuclear weapons on places where ISIS is
operating? That's what's implied by the bit about sand glowing in the
dark, but he'd never cop to that. How about carpet-bombing? After all,
part of the difficulty with fighting ISIS from the air is that they
control cities full of civilians. The American military doesn't lack for
ordnance; we could level those cities if we wanted. But doing so would
mean thousands and thousands of civilian casualties, killing the very
people we'd be claiming to want to save. That's not only morally
abhorrent, it would be extremely likely to produce the kind of hatred
towards America that helped Al Qaeda thrive, helped ISIS replace Al
Qaeda, and would help the next terrorist group take ISIS's place.
In an interview Wednesday with NPR,
Cruz got asked about this problem, and put his finely honed evasion
skills to work. Asked by host Steve Inskeep whether he wanted to
"flatten" cities where ISIS is located, Cruz said, "I think we need to
use every military tool at our disposal to defeat ISIS." Inskeep pressed
him: "You can flatten a city. Do you want to do that?" Cruz responded,
"The problem with what President Obama is doing" is that he's too soft,
noting that in World War II we didn't worry about the welfare of the
German people, we just fought. "FDR carpet-bombed cities," Inskeep
noted. "Is that what you want to do?" Cruz answered, "I want to
carpet-bomb ISIS."
Of course, Cruz is hardly the only presidential candidate offering
absurdly simplistic ideas about how to solve this problem. But one might
think that the destruction we could wreak upon civilian populations in
the Middle East would be a matter of particular concern given our recent
history. Estimates of the civilian casualties in the Iraq War range
somewhere between 165,000 and 500,000,
but conservatives seem convinced that all that suffering and death had
nothing to do with the rise of ISIS, and repeating it would be
regrettable but not produce any blowback.
Perhaps we have trouble understanding what it's like to have a foreign
army bombing or occupying your country because it's been so long. We
haven't had such an army on our soil since the War of 1812, and though
we were attacked at Pearl Harbor and then 60 years later on 9/11, those
were events confined to a single day. So we can't seem to grasp the kind
of resentment and even hatred that an extended military campaign can
foster, no matter how noble the ideals of the country that sent the army
carrying it out. When the Bush administration assumed we'd be "greeted
as liberators" in Iraq (as Dick Cheney put it), they simply couldn't
contemplate that Iraqis might not be excited to see us rain down bombs,
destroy their infrastructure, and then occupy their country, even if
they didn't like the dictator they were living under.
Grasping that requires empathy and a little imagination, neither of
which is in good supply in the GOP these days, let alone among its
presidential candidates. It's the luxury of running for office that you
can make all problems sound simple, pretend that you can carpet-bomb a
city and kill only the bad guys and not the people living there, and act
as though strength and resolve are all you need to solve problems. The
scary thing to contemplate is that someone like Ted Cruz might actually
believe his campaign rhetoric, and put it into action if he became
president.
-- Paul Waldman
***
Donald Trump gets along with everybody.
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