Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson gave a long, rambling, and confusing response Tuesday night to a question about the Middle East during the Fox Business debate.

Carson was asked if he supported President Obama’s decision to put special operation forces in Syria and leave U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Here’s what Carson said:

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 Putin is trying to really spread his influence throughout the Middle East. This is going to be his base. And we have to oppose him there and in an effective way. We also must recognize it’s a very complex place. 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. But we can’t give up ground right there. But we have to look at this on a much more global scale. We’re talking about global jihadists, and their desire is to destroy us and to destroy our way of life.

So we have to be saying, how do we make them look like losers, because 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.

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 then 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.