In less than 10 months, the world will have a new U.S. president and so far the presidential candidates, whether Republican or Democratic ones, seem to have either a more extreme approach toward the so-called war on terror, “Islamic extremism,” and U.S. policy in the Middle East, or an uninformed and superficial one.

It has been almost 15 years since former President George W. Bush launched his “war on terror” in the Middle East, Asia and the world as a response to 9/11 attacks on the New York and Washington D.C. that killed almost 3,000 people.

Since then, extremism is on the rise around the world and the Middle East has plunged into a series of conflicts that have killed and displaced millions of people. Yet, U.S. presidential candidates still get the Middle East and the Islamic world wrong.

While Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton's and Bernie Sanders' Middle East positions are far from perfect, the Republican candidates possess troubling policies and views on Muslims, global terror and the region in general that are far more extreme than even former President Bush.

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In his speech in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, Bush made a case for his subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, and later Iraq, to hunt Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida group that carried out the attacks. However, he remained careful when pointing fingers.

“We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” said Bush in 2001, referring to the Taliban group which ruled Afghanistan and provided refuge for al-Qaida.

In the whole speech, Bush did not once mention the word Muslims or Islam. Of course that did not stop him from implementing some of the most anti-Muslim policies in the history of his country, from approving torture in Guantanamo against mostly Muslim detainees to religious and racial profiling within the U.S. and abroad, to initiating a secret spying program by the National Security Agency.

But Bush and his aides did care about how Muslims in the U.S. thought and viewed his rhetoric, even if not genuine and contradicted by his administration's actions. However, he did not flaunt such policies in the faces of his Muslim allies in the Middle East, nor in the face of his Muslim citizens.

Now, 15 years later, Republican candidates have no problem doing just that: alienating everyone for the sake of “wining, wining, winning” as real estate billionaire Donald Trump put it few days ago.

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Trump, the Republican front-runner for the nomination, wants to ban all Muslims from entering his the U.S. until “we figure out what the hell is going on,” referring to a conspiracy by Muslims against the Western world, according to Middle East experts.

“That second half of the statement is what intrigues me most: What is going on, beyond a complicated conflict that is spiraling out of control?” Kim Ghattas, an academic on Arab studies and a BBC anchor, wrote in a column for Foreign Policy magazine.

“Trump’s anti-Muslim statement alludes to a conspiracy of sorts, some secret plan by Muslims of the world to take over the United States. Trump appears prone to such conspiracy thinking on other issues as well, and he feeds that tendency in his supporters,” Ghattas added.

Trump also said he would bring back torture programs within the military and government security agencies in the country and abroad, which are now banned by an executive order from current U.S. President Barack Obama. But Trump says he wants waterboarding, and would even “approve more than that.”
 

.@theCCR's Baher Azmy: By embracing waterboarding, Trump “has admitted that he would commit war crimes" pic.twitter.com/kSfcYAUttR

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) February 24, 2016

While extreme, Trump is also confused when it comes to Islam and the Middle East in general. Oddly, he has made refreshing arguments when it comes to the Iraq war in 2003 and the intervention in Libya in 2011, alomost sounding left-wing in his critiques.

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“Iraq is a disaster .… Libya is not even a country,” Trump said during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press. “You can make the case, if you look at Libya, look at what we did there — it’s a mess. If you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look what we did there — it’s a mess.”

During a Republican debate, Trump engaged in a heated back-and-forth with the rest of the candidates as he scolded Bush over the Iraq war. However, Trump is an advocate of going into Syria and “destroying ISIS” there, also known as the Islamic State group, a terror group which is an indirect consequence of the Iraq war.

Trump also wants to stay neutral on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, something unheard of in U.S. politics where Israel is Washington’s best and key ally in the Middle East and is usually always supported versus the “Palestinian” territories. For Trump, a deal must be made for ending the conflict there where both sides are relatively happy, sort of a business deal.

But when asked about his controversial view, Trump always ends up saying he would never cut billions of dollars of military aid to Israel or jeopardize the U.S.-Israeli ties. Noticing a trend? The guy who is heading toward the Republican nomination head-on seems clueless about the Middle East.

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The second leading Republican candidate has yet another troubling view on how to go about dealing with what he calls “Islamic terrorism.” Ted Cruz’s simply wants to carpet-bomb wherever the Islamic State group is, namely Syria and Iraq, by which he will make “make the sand glow.”

For Cruz, there are two kinds of Arabs: the “good” Christian kind and the “bad” Muslim. He told Arab Christians that their best ally is Israel. As if it is not big enough with US$600 million yearly budget, Cruz wants to expand the military. BBC’s Ghattas rightly called that “a recipe for Bush-era interventionism, on steroids.”

On Israel and Palestine, Cruz made abundantly clear that he would side 100 percent with the Israelis against the Palestinians and increase aid to Israel. He vowed, if elected president, that he would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a city at the center of a religious and political conflict.  

Meanwhile, the third leading Republican candidate is the one who on one hand sounds measured, but on the other also subtly and dangerously feeds into the increasing Islamophobia in the country.

The truth! @tedcruz and @marcorubio Are NOT #Latino Leaders https://t.co/smrDehJ6st

— Aldo (@ladycaucau) February 11, 2016

At home, Rubio advocates getting armed with guns and weapons and whatever it takes in order to be protected from the Islamic State group militants in the United States, which feeds into this fear that extremist groups have camps and militants on the ground in the country, which is simply unproven.

Feeding into the fear also come across clearly through Rubio's ideas on the Syrian refugees. He is against letting in any Syrian refugees “because it is currently impossible to verify their identities or intentions.”

According to Rubio, millions of Syrians should be all punished and denied help and aid and refuge because one in a hundreds of thousands of refugees could possibly be a disguised militant. His argument, especially in the U.S.’s case, is unfounded.

The United States has accepted only 1,500 Syrian refugees over the past five years due to the extremely complicated and lengthy vetting process for any refugees coming from the Middle East.

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Meanwhile, to defeat the Islamic State group, Rubio would unlike President Barack Obama invade Syria with ground troops. “When I am president, I will tell my commanders that the mission is the total destruction of ISIL and will send them the forces necessary to succeed,” he wrote in an article for Politico following the Paris attacks last November.

This is not surprising considering that both Cruz and Rubio support the Iraq invasion in 2003, which itself in one way or another created the Islamic State group they want to defeat.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, during a debate Thursday Rubio presented Israel as the most democratic state in the world and the Palestinians as “monsters” who are out there to kill Jewish people. “You cannot be an honest broker when one side is acting in bad faith,” Rubio said and added that Palestinians: "teach their four-year-old children to kill Jews."

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The most troubling trend is the the fact that such extremist and irrational policies and promises by the Republican candidates are in fact providing them with support among the Republican voters in the United States.

Renowned linguist and political scientist Noam Chomsky explained that the rise of those candidates and the popularity of their extremism as well as calling Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ “extremism” is a proof of “the shift to the right of the whole political spectrum” over the past few decades, and certainly since Bush’s days.