During an interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz this Sunday, GOP presidential candidate Bobby Jindal was challenged by the anchor on his plan to implement “no-fly zones” as a tactic to combat ISIS.
Raddatz started by mentioning Jindal’s support for a failed plan to arm Syrian rebels in their civil war against president Bashar al-Assad.
“That has been a complete failure,” she said. “The Obama administration said, essentially, that it wasn’t working.”
“The reality is that they’ve dithered, they’ve waited so long that we’ve got fewer good options,” Jindal replied. “If they’d have aggressively trained those rebels in the beginning, if they had armed and trained the Kurds, we’d be in a different place.”
“But how do you train rebels who are there to fight [Assad] to suddenly want to fight ISIS?” Raddatz asked. “That’s the main problem with those Syrian rebels.”
Jindal suggested that the U.S. should be arming the Kurds instead of the Syrian rebels, along with creating “a no-fly zone working with our Turkish and other allies.”
“Let’s talk about a no-fly zone,” Raddatz interrupted. “ISIS doesn’t have aircraft. So what would that no-fly zone really accomplish? When has it really worked?”
Jindal replied that a no-fly zone would “stabilize the region so you don’t have all these refugees flooding into Europe and trying to leave the country,” adding that it would show “our Sunni allies in the region that we’re serious about winning this” by preventing Russian warplanes from bombing them.
“These are radical Islamic terrorists that are burning people alive, crucifying, killing Christians and other religious minorities,” Jindal continued. “We have to hunt them down and kill them before they attack us here.”
“You don’t think that’s what they’re doing now?” Raddatz replied incredulously. “We’ve had thousands and thousands of airstrikes. ISIS is not a traditional army. The reason — and I’ve been out on an aircraft carrier — I have seen those jets coming back with their bombs still attached because they can’t drop bombs in congested areas. They can’t risk killing innocent civilians in those areas.”
Watch the exchange in the video below, via Raw Story:
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