In the wake of the Paris and Baghdad bombings last week by ISIS, here’s a sampling of what the candidates for US president have previously said about the threat and how to handle it.
“I say that you can defeat ISIS by taking their wealth. Take back the oil. Once you go over and take back that oil, they have nothing. ” Donald Trump
”The war with the Islamic State is ‘a battle for the soul of Islam’ and it’s going to have to be the Muslim countries who are stepping up. These are billionaire families all over that region. They’ve got to get their hands dirty. They’ve got to get their troops on the ground. They’ve got to win that war with our support. We cannot be leading the effort…” Bernie Sanders
“There is no greater risk to this country than the risk posed by radical Islamic terrorists … We need to make it unmistakably clear that we will take whatever it takes for however long it takes to defeat radical Islamic terrorism.” Marco Rubio
“Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat.” Hillary Clinton
“We must understand that a hatred of our values exists, and acknowledge that interventions in foreign countries may well exacerbate this hatred.” Rand Paul
“Islamofascism sworn to annihilate each of us who believe in a free society, all in the name of a perversion of religion and an impersonal god.” Mike Huckabee
