This would have been an instructive Senate hearing for Ted Cruz to attend: “U.S. Strategy to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and U.S. Policy Toward Iraq and Syria.”

The bellicose senator from Texas blew that one off on Wednesday; he was in New York, shaking his saber on Fox News and courting big-dollar donors at a closed-door luncheon on Madison Avenue.

His favorite line on ISIS seems to be, “We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion,” which he said in Iowa last week. His irresponsible chatter is of a piece with most Republican presidential candidates, who are busy offering phony prescriptions for the biggest foreign threat the United States faces.

Mr. Cruz is a lawyer and a foreign-policy neophyte. Anyone with any understanding of military strategy knows that “carpet-bombing” is a term used by amateurs trying to sound tough. Indiscriminate bombing has never been a military strategy, and it would be senseless in an age of “smart” weaponry and precise targeting.