A poll on Friday by Public Policy Polling perfectly encapsulates the Republican presidential race so far: “30 per cent of Republican primary voters nationally say they support bombing Agrabah.” That would be the fictional country in Aladdin.

Republican voters, urged on by the Republican candidates, are now eager to bomb anywhere that has a Muslim-sounding name regardless of whether or not it comes from a cartoon. While the poll itself may be amusing, it’s not exactly surprising given the cartoonish levels of tough-guy militarism that spews from the mouth of every Republican candidate as they try to one-up each other on who would start more wars harder and quicker.

Carpet bombing



Ted Cruz has spent the last two weeks calling for a “carpet bombing” of the West Asian region in an attempt to destroy the Islamic State (IS), saying he wants to see if “sand can glow in the dark”. He defended this call on national television on Tuesday while outright avoiding the question of whether that means he’s prepared to kill the hundreds of thousands of civilians that live in IS’s de-facto capital of Raqqa, Syria.

Donald Trump, in between his calls for banning Muslims here at home, also called on American forces to commit war crimes by killing the families of terrorists. His meaningless calls to “bomb the shit out of Isis” naturally have led all the other candidates to trip over each other in an attempt to find more and more colourful adjectives to describe how their bombs would look.

Chris Christie was perhaps the most absurd: he threatened war with both Russia and China during the last debate. Mr. Christie claimed he was totally willing to start World War-III with Russia over a No-Fly Zone in Syria and would shoot down Russian pilots immediately. His reason? To avenge the thousands killed by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, and the “millions running around the world, running for their lives.”

So Mr. Christie’s position is: we will start World War III to save Syrians, but we draw the line in at allowing 5-year-old Syrian orphans into the United States . Lost in the insanity of the rest of the debate was also Mr. Christie’s call for all out cyber-war with China .

On top of all this, it’s such a foregone conclusion that many of these candidates will happily rip up the Iran nuclear deal that hardly anyone even asks them anymore. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015