Republicans and the Fallacy of “Carpet Bombing”

One of the many hot ticket debate issues during this election season has been candidates’ proposed policy for dealing with the Islamic State. While Obama has referred to ISIS as the “JV Team” of terrorism, Republican candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, most notably, have been much more apprehensive of ISIS, and have proposed drastic action against militants.

Perhaps a better a better description than drastic is childish. When asked how he would deal with ISIS, Donald Trump said his plan was to (no joke) “bomb the sh*t out of them,” “them” referring to ISIS-controlled oil fields.  He would then have oil companies go in and rebuild the oil pipes.

When asked if he would be destroying the wealth of Iraq by destroying oil fields, Trump responded with “There is no Iraq. Their leaders are corrupt.” For protection of the oil fields, Trump says that he would “put a ring around them.” Not a wall, surprisingly, but a ring of U.S. troops. What’s concerning is that Trump considers a country with corrupt leaders as the same as a country that doesn’t exist. Secondly, his strategy for protecting an oil field is to surround it with a ring of soldiers? Granted, he might not have literally meant that, but it’s really, really hard to tell sometimes. Finally, proposing “bombing the sh*t out of our enemies” as potential foreign policy makes conflict with ISIS seem like a very simple, black-and-white issue. It’s not.

Ted Cruz has been, surprisingly, even more aggressive than Trump in his proposed strategies for dealing with ISIS. Cruz is insistent on “carpet bombing” ISIS. Army Lt. General Sean MacFarland said recently, “Indiscriminate bombing, where we don’t care if we’re killing innocents or combatants, is just inconsistent with our values.” This remark was aimed at Cruz, who refuses to back down from his “carpet bombing” strategy.

When Ted Cruz talks about carpet-bombing, he perhaps intended to make reference to a strategy that the US military employed during the Persian Gulf War. The problem is, that strategy was notable because it was the first use of precision-guided weapons to minimize civilian casualties. Essentially, the opposite of carpet-bombing, which is indiscriminate-bombing over an area of land to make it look as though a carpet has been rolled over it, a strategy used in WWII.

Whether Ted Cruz plans to minimize civilian casualties is rather unclear. While he claims that he would only “carpet bomb where ISIS is,” he has been aggressively talking about “precision carpet-bombing,” an oxymoron in itself. In December during a speech, he said, “We will utterly destroy ISIS. 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.” To most people, making sand glow from bombing it so much doesn’t sound like a strategy with much concern for civilian lives. And finally, when asked about bombing Raqqah, the ISIS capital, which has many civilian residents, Cruz responded by saying “You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops.” When will he realize that those two places are the same?