Article: Republicans are so bullish on war that 30% would bomb a fictional country

Reprinted from The Guardian

The level of tough-guy militarism that Republican candidates spew looks like a race to see who would start more wars harder and quicker

Republican Candidates talk war
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A poll on Friday by Public Policy Polling perfectly encapsulates the Republican presidential race so far: "30% 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 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.

Ted Cruz has spent the past two weeks calling for a "carpet bombing" of the Middle East in an attempt to destroy Isis, saying he wants to see if "sand can glow in the dark." He defended this call on national television Tuesday while outright avoiding the question of whether that means he's prepared to kill the hundreds of thousands of civilians that live in Isis'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 sh*t out of Isis" naturally have led all the other candidates to trip over each other in an attempt to find more and more colorful adjectives to describe how their bombs would look.

Chris Christie, whose whole campaign seems based around trying to sound like he could beat the other candidates up for their lunch money, was perhaps the most absurd: he threatened war with both Russia and China during the last debate. Christie claimed he was totally willing to start a third world war with Russia over a no-fly zone in Syria and would shoot down Russian pilots immediately. His reason? To avenge the thousands killed by Assad, and the "millions running around the world, running for their lives." So Christie's position is: we will start the third world war to save Syrians, but we draw the line in at allowing five-year-old Syrian orphans into the United States.

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