Saturday, December 12, 2015

When It Comes Time to Attack Ted Cruz Even NYT Understands Blowback

In an editorial NYT writes:

This would have been an instructive Senate hearing for Ted Cruz to attend: “U.S. Strategy to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and U.S. Policy Toward Iraq and Syria.”

The bellicose senator from Texas blew that one off on Wednesday; he was in New York, shaking his saber on Fox News and courting big-dollar donors at a closed-door luncheon on Madison Avenue.

His favorite line on ISIS seems to be, “We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion,” which he said in Iowa last week. His irresponsible chatter is of a piece with most Republican presidential candidates, who are busy offering phony prescriptions for the biggest foreign threat the United States faces.

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....

Ted Cruz, a man who thinks he’s qualified to be commander in chief, decries terrorists’ taking of innocent lives while agitating for bombing that would kill thousands of noncombatants and radicalize thousands more. What he’s saying shows an utter lack of fitness to command America’s armed forces.

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