A few weeks ago, Trump said that in the old days, to the victor went the spoils. It is a concept popularized by Julius Caesar in about 62BC while conquering Gaul to pay off debts. According to Trump, we should have kept a small force in place in Iraq to take the oil from their reserves as the spoils of war. Tonight he repeated that assertion.
I’m not sure what has shocked me the most: that a nominee of a major party would say such a thing or that it would go essentially unchallenged. Suppose our policy in the Iraq War had been “to the victor goes the spoils.” How would that have set with our allies. Would they want some of the booty also? How would that go over with the UN (not the it would matter with the Trump Administration). In general, how would that go over in the Muslim world.
Suppose that had been our policy in the Gulf War. Would we have taken the Iraq oil plus the Kuwaiti oil? In WWII, would we have taken whatever we could out of Germany and Japan? I don’t want to suggest that the US has always had pure motives in entering wars or that we have never exploited populations following an armed conflict.
But Trump would destroy even a pretense of a higher purpose. We could quickly and easily become the most reviled country in the world. Why doesn’t this get more attention? Are there just too many dumpster fires out there to report on all of them?