Carson on ISIS: ‘Destroy Their Caliphate’

Dr. Ben Carson, a GOP presidential frontrunner and retired neurosurgeon, expressed foreign policy aptitude during Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate.

Carson was asked by Fox Business host and debate moderator Maria Bartiromo if he supports President Obama’s recent initiative to place 50 special ops forces in Syria, and leave 10,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

“Well, 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 [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is trying to really spread his influence throughout the Middle East,” Carson responded.

“This is going to be his base,” he added of the Russian dictator. “And we have to oppose him there and in an effective way. We also must recognize it’s a very complex place.”

Carson, who has continued to express a keen interest in foreign affairs throughout the primary process, continued:

“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.”

He went on to discuss what America could do to regain a foothold in the region.

“But we can’t give up ground right there. We have to look at this on a much more global scale,” Carson said. “We’re talking about global jihadists, and their desire is to destroy us and to destroy our way of life.”

Carson then proposed that America must engage in a war of ideas against the radicals abroad.

“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,” he stated.

“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 concluded.