Ben Carson on ISIS: ‘Eradicate them now’

Dr. Ben Carson said on Sunday that the United States should move to immediately defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and other extremist terrorist groups.

{mosads}”We can sit back and say, ‘Nah, they’re not that big a deal,’ or we can recognize that the longer we allow them to grow, to spread, to root – get their roots well established – the more difficult it will be to eradicate them,” Carson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“We have to eradicate them now,” he said. “We have to use every means possible to do that.”

Carson, the former Johns Hopkins University neurosurgeon and potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate, slammed big-government programs and policies in a speech opening the Conservative Political Action Conference last week.

“There’s no question our standing in the world has changed very dramatically,” he told NBC on Sunday. “There’s no question that the leadership sets a very good measure of what kind of country we’re gonna be and whether our allies should trust us and whether our enemies should test us.”

Should Carson decide to launch his own Republican presidential bid in 2016, he vowed Sunday that he “would have a very different vision” from President Obama, one focused on supporting the Constitution.

Asked if he would face similar criticisms of inexperience Obama faced when he ran for the White House, Carson suggested those criticisms were unfair.

“I’m not sure that the criticism of President Obama is accurate,” Carson said. “You have to decide what it is that he wanted to accomplish. He wanted to accomplish fundamental change in America. I think he’s done quite a bit of that.”

Carson said he would decide not to run for the White House “if I found there was really no support for it. that would cause me not to run.”

For now, Carson said, “I’m seeing a very substantial amount of support across the country in red states, blue states – north, south, east, west.”