All right, I will start off saying it’s a scary moment when you read something that Ted Cruz said and think, “Hey, I kinda agree with that.” But Cruz seems to have done his best blind squirrel imitation, finding a nut by putting forth the idea that picking and choosing the leaders that we want to remain in power doesn’t always work out quite as well as we hope it will:
“If President Obama and Hillary Clinton and Sen. Rubio succeed in toppling Assad, the result will be the radical Islamic terrorist will take over Syria, that Syria will be controlled by ISIS, and that is materially worse for U.S. national security interests,” Cruz said.
Cruz, who has been gaining some ground in recent polls, also said the United States should not have supported the overthrow of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, or even former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Thank you, Captain Hindsight. Now, if you want to actually do something useful, find a way to travel back about a decade and a half and direct this to the administration that actually needed to hear it:
If you topple a stable ruler, throw a Middle Eastern country into chaos and hand it over to radical Islamic terrorists, that hurts America
Like most Americans, I’m far from a fan of Assad, and ideally it would probably be better if he weren’t in power, so if a way can be worked out for a peaceful, stable handover of power then that is probably for the best, depending of course on who the power is handed over to. But, as usually is the case in situations like this, enemies and friends are hard to distinguish, and sometimes the enemy (Assad) of your enemy (ISIS) is maybe not quite your friend but possibly at least the lesser of two evils. So maybe we shouldn’t be rushing to get rid of the devil we know by any means necessary in exchange for the devil we might not.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Ted Cruz is still Ted Cruz so of course he couldn’t get by without being at least a little bit of a moron:
Cruz said he would not commit American ground troops to fight Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, but instead said he would vastly expand U.S. airstrikes and directly provide arms to Kurds who are fighting ISIL in the region.
Or, in other words, he would do either almost exactly or pretty close to what the President is already doing, depending on whether you consider Special Ops to be “ground troops” or not. In fact, if he’s talking about a strict interpretation of “no ground troops” then what he’s saying could be construed as scaling back operations, at least somewhat, which would seem to amount to GOP heresy. Now, of course determining the relationship between what a candidate says and what that candidate really believes or would actually do given the chance is about as easy as writing a coherent sentence by stirring alphabet soup, but hey, it’s nice to at least hear something that doesn’t further push the envelope of lunacy, even if it is from a source that is hard to picture as having even a tenuous grip on reality.