Dr. Ben Carson: “global jihadists are an existential threat to us”

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Frank Gaffney: It is with the greatest of pleasure that I welcome a man that all of us have come to know and admire, I think greatly by public opinion poll standards at least he’s off the charts in terms of the favorability ratings, and I think that is because what is absolutely unmistakable about our guest doctor Ben Carson. He is an extraordinary human being, a decent man, a brilliant neurosurgeon, and now a man putting himself in the arena for the candidacy for the Republican nomination for the Presidency, and comporting himself with great distinction, and apparently with considerable results with the public. Doctor Carson, welcome to Secure Freedom Radio, it’s great to have you with us sir.

Dr. Ben Carson: Thank you Frank, good to be with you thanks

FG: Of course you were much in evidence in the recent debate in California, the second of the two. Your views on a particular priority I think for those of us associated with this program were very heartening as far as they went and I’d ask you just to sort of tease out a little bit, your thinking on what you call the global jihad, and the necessity of destroying it.

BC: Well a lot of people think back to anything bad that happened when we got involved, for instance if we lost a lot of people in Iraq, and we went from a budget surplus to deficits that you know have had tremendously (inaudible) impacts, and they said we don’t want to do that again. But they need to recognize what’s going on now and what was going on then are two different things, and what’s going on now with the global jihadists is an existential threat to us. They want to destroy us, and they want to destroy our way of life, and everything that we represent, and they are in the process of building themselves up. They gained tremendous strength and numbers just over the last couple of years. Primarily because we’ve kind of said that’s a problem for those people over there, that’s not our problem, and you know they’ve been able to take large portions of Iraq. I think they probably have half of Iraq now including Anbar province, and they’ve taken a third of Syria, and they have footholds in Somalia, and Tunisia, and Nigeria, and they have established a caliphate, and they want to just increase that. What we have to do is we have to recognize that we have two options. We can allows them to continue to grow and accomplish their goal, or we can use every resource known to man including the financial markets, including our covert activities, including special forces, and if need be troops, in order to take I think away what they’ve gained, particularly in Iraq drive them up into Syria.

FG: You, I think, have connected one of the most important dots, and I must say I think it has been largely absent from leaders of this country, that there is in fact this phenomenon at work a global jihad movement. It’s not just the franchise doing business here, or there, under the Islamic State flag, or the Taliban, or Hamas, or Hezbollah. It’s really an enterprise that despite myriad differences within its ranks is none the less of a mind about what needs to be done to us, which is to force us to submit or to be destroyed. What you’ve just said, I think, is particularly important and that is, that where we are today versus where we were a decade ago, is that the capabilities of this jihad have enhanced greatly. It may be that they’ve always had this ambition but they’ve certainly improved their capabilities, and in that regard I was kind of struck. I don’t recall you talking about the Iran, well I call it the ObamaBomb deal. What is your view of that? Because that really does seem to me to be a such a qualitative change in the jihadist enterprise, that I’d be interested in your thoughts of what we should be doing there.

BC: Well you know I was extremely disappointed, I didn’t feel that the Congress put up the kind of fight that they should have, and one of the advantageous of putting up a fight is that you bring it to the forefront, so that everybody sees what’s going on. The President and his administration were able to do this a lot of under the covers, and without the American people recognizing what was going on, and as they found out more of course they’re outraged, but you know the process has been moved along much too far. This should have been done in my opinion as a treaty and not as an executive bill, but of course the President didn’t want to do that because that would require two-thirds approval of the Senates, and he has his own agendas and doesn’t really care.

FG: And of course Secretary of State John Kerry, said we didn’t have the votes for it to be passed as a treaty, and that was probably the ulterior motive of the first order. So where does that leave us today as you see it? Are you in the camp that seem to be the majority of the candidates that says ‘you know I’m not going to have anything to do with this agreement should I become President’, or there were some who seemed to say, as our colleague Fred Fleitz pointed out a short while ago, that you know well we’ll just have to suck it up and live with it.

BC: Well I think this is a horrible agreement, and of course the day that the President leaves office it is of not effective if the next President doesn’t agree with it. That’s the disadvantage of doing it as an executive deal, and I don’t need to say that we shouldn’t talk. I think I would advocates for new talks, but the conditions of those talks they still have our hostages. They let them go and that we have anytime anywhere inspections by the people that we want to do the inspections. If they don’t agree to that that then it tells you right off the bat that they have nefarious motives.

FG: Yeah I think it’s pretty clear that these guys have pretty nefarious motives. That death to America thing is kind of a clue as you say. Doctor Carson let me ask you about one other issue. It’s arisen to some extent in the course of the debate out at the Presidential Library, Ronald Reagan’s Library, but also I guess in your appearance on the O’Reilly Factor yesterday, namely your views on Afghanistan. You’ve said you oppose the war there, explain what your thinking is about that conflict and what we should have done instead.

BC: I don’t oppose taking action because you know the training camps absolutely needed to wiped out, Osama bin Laden absolutely, we should have gone after him, but I’m not sure that requires you know putting our troops out there in harms way where they can be just picked off, which is unfortunately what happened in many cases. So I would be looking for different ways to do aggressive use of some of our special forces, absolutely I’m a hundred percent for that, but recognize that Afghanistan is a country that really doesn’t have a dependable central government. They have you know 300 tribal leaders and the successes that we have had, you know stem from the fact that we were able to do things in conjunction with the Northern Alliance of those leaders, but as that situation has deteriorated so has our safety over there. So you know in no way am I dubish on the need for us to respond. I’m just talking about the ways that we do it.

FG: And I think many of us feel very much of the view that trying to occupy a nation like Afghanistan with its hostility, with its you know attachment to Shariah among other things is a fools errand and agree with you very much that we really missed a bet in terms of being a able to work with the Northern Alliance tribes to counter the Taliban, as they did so effectively for a time, and as we need them to do I think on an ongoing basis.

BC: I think we have a lot of history when we look at Jimmy Carter and then we look at Barrack Obama, and we look at where we were when both of those administrations started and we look at where we were when they finished in terms of respect and overall it tells you something. You know its only when we manifest the muscle that we have in the appropriate way that we get the kind of respect that then allows us to have successful foreign policy. We cannot have successful foreign policy if people perceive us as weak and un-defendable.

FG: As you know so well doctor Ben Carson, President Reagan used to call that peace through strength. I’m thrilled that you embrace that concept and most especially I have to say, I think you articulation of a strategy going forward against the global jihad of using all instruments of national power, which is really what Reagan did against the Soviet Union, is not only his commendable but urgently needed, so thank you for taking a bit of time to discuss all of these with us. I hope you’ll come back often as the campaign continues and God bless you sir. We appreciate your past service to our people and country, and that that you are offering in the future. Keep it up and come back to us very soon.