Cruz has been wedded to this whole “carpet bombing” thing for a while now—he’s also said that he wants to bomb the Middle East until the sand glows—but as the policy has come under more and more criticism, he’s only doubled-down.
Carpet bombing is banned under the Geneva Convention because it does not differentiate between civilian and military targets but tonight Cruz tried to thread the needle and claim that his carpet bombing would be ethical: “Now when I say saturation carpet bombing, that’s not indiscriminate.”
That’s preposterous for a number of reasons, the biggest of which being that carpet bombing is, by its very definition, indiscriminate and that ISIS is based in a number of heavily populated cities, meaning that tens of thousands of civilians would die in any “carpet bombing” campaign.
I’ve questioned the sincerity of Cruz’s position here before—it has all the hallmarks of cynical campaign rhetoric—but he increasingly seems to be actively wishing for another Dresden.