Carson disputes having ‘mentor’ on foreign policy

A foreign policy adviser whom Ben Carson publicly distanced himself from after the adviser criticized Carson’s grasp of the Middle East provided information for an opinion article Carson published online in The Washington Post on Wednesday about defeating the Islamic State.

The campaign called the adviser, Duane R. Clarridge, on Monday for help with the article, which was conceived to counter poor impressions Carson had made in a “Fox News Sunday” interview the day before. In that appearance, Carson could not name what nations he would call first to form a coalition to counter the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the Paris terrorist attacks.

Clarridge “gave input telling us we need to get in real substance, not fluff, saying to be bold about it,” Armstrong Williams, a senior adviser to Carson, said Wednesday.

Carson said on Tuesday evening in an interview on “PBS News Hour” that Clarridge, a former CIA officer, was “not my adviser.”

In The New York Times that day, Clarridge was quoted as saying that Carson was unable to absorb “one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East” and that Clarridge had recommended weekly briefings so “we can make him smart.”

On PBS, Carson called Clarridge “a person who has come in on a couple of our sessions to offer his opinion about what was going on,” adding, “To call himself my adviser would be a great stretch.”

Williams, who is Carson’s closest aide although he has no official title in the campaign, had identified Clarridge as “a mentor for Dr. Carson.”

Clarridge, 83, said in an interview that he had called Williams on Monday morning after Carson’s appearance on “Fox News Sunday” and said, “Look, he stepped in it.”

Clarridge said he supplied a five-point plan for defeating Islamic State, including cautioning that Western ground troops would be unwelcome by moderate Arab countries.

In the Post op-ed article, titled “My Plan to Defeat the Islamic State,” Carson advocates seizing Islamic State-held oil fields “with a coalition of local (Iraqi, Turkish and Kurdish) ground troops and Western military advisers and Special Operations forces.”