A flimsy attempt by the hard left to discredit the man who has been the clear choice for prez since he announced his candidacy

A frequent commenter here at LITD recently brought up last winter's "controversy" over Ted Cruz's "carpet-bomb-ISIS" remark, citing a military expert's denunciation of it as ill-informed and reckless. One can find a number of such supposed smackdowns. They all have one thing in common: A willful overlooking of what he obviously meant due to the basic dislike of Ted on the part of the person purporting to refute him.
The whole thing is pretty much yesterday's news, but let's just clarify things for the record:

For those who think that Ted Cruz’s reference to “carpet bombing” ISIS is somehow equivalent to Donald Trump’s call to “take out their families,” you’re either purposely being obtuse, you genuinely don’t understand what you’re talking about, or you’ve ordered a double-shot of Trump Kool-Aid and went back for seconds.

In last night’s debate, Cruz was asked about “carpet bombing” ISIS.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has been criticized for vowing on the campaign trail to “carpet bomb” ISIS, said Thursday that he will “apologize to nobody” for that promise.

“It is not tough talk, it is a different fundamental military strategy than what we’ve seen from Barack Obama,” Cruz said. Cruz appealed to the example of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, which he said featured a higher rate of air strikes.

In mid-December, the New York Times criticized Cruz for first using the “carpet bomb” term.

“Hit reset,” he said. “Meaning, pound Raqqa into a parking lot.”

His idea of obliterating the Islamic State’s de facto capital — including killing thousands of innocent people — was met with anxious stares, but the Republican presidential candidates could have been watching with approval. Some have called for loosening the “rules of engagement” when it comes to fighting Islamic State militants, and during Tuesday night’s debate Senator Ted Cruz renewed his call to “carpet-bomb” ISIS.

Historically, that would mean leveling a place without regard for collateral damage. But the senator from Texas seemed to suggest that a Cruz administration would be able wipe out militants without harming civilians.

But that’s not what Cruz meant, and they know it. They even wrote it in the very next paragraph.

“You would carpet-bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops,” Mr. Cruz explained. “You use air power directed — and you have embedded special forces to direction the air power. But the object isn’t to level a city. The object is to kill the ISIS terrorists.”

The U.S. hasn’t used carpet bombing since Vietnam. I used to work for a retired Air Force Major who was the navigator in the lead B-52D over Haiphong Harbor in the first raid in Linebacker II. He told me his string of bombs obliterated the rail yard, and another 26 (or so) bombers dropped time-on-target after his. Over 12 days, we flew 729 sorties over Hanoi and Haiphong.

That’s carpet bombing.

The closest we came since then was during Operation Desert Storm when we used B-52s to drop dumb bombs on Saddam’s bunkered troops along the Saudi and Kuwaiti border to keep them pinned while Schwarzkopf pivoted into the desert around them. That was nothing more than making holes in the sand.

America doesn’t carpet bomb cities anymore. We don’t need to because we have precision guided munitions. Cruz knows this and so does the media. Claiming Cruz suggested any other meaning than increasing the tempo of operations and relaxing President Obama’s impossible zero-collateral-damage ROE is nothing more than political spin and posturing to attack Cruz.

 The same tired propagandist arguments used against Israel apply to Cruz: collateral damage is acceptable if the terrorists are putting civilians in harm’s way. The International Red Cross writes about Rule 97 of the Geneva Convention:

With respect to non-international armed conflicts, Additional Protocol II does not explicitly mention the use of human shields, but such practice would be prohibited by the requirement that “the civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against the dangers arising from military operations”

If ISIS puts civilians on top of targets of military value or stores munitions in mosques, we can bomb them, and do it with a clear conscience, as long as we do what we can to limit civilian deaths. The problem is, you can’t limit civilian deaths when your enemy ensures civilians will die if you attack them. Every civilized country in the world deals with this issue. Russia, for its part, does what Trump recommends: “Bomb the sh*t out of them.”

Now that the race has been winnowed down to the two Freedom-Haters, the wild man from Queens, and Ted (well, officially, the squish from Ohio is still in, but at best serves to throw the race to someone other than Ted), what was clear even when there were seventeen Republican contenders and four Freedom-Hater contenders is even more clear: There is only one Constitutionalist, limited-government, free-market-devoted patriot rooted in sound Christian doctrine running for president. The choice is clear.