Our wanna-be Maximum-Leader-for-Life was breathtaking in his ignorance of everything at the NBC Commander In Chief Forum this evening, and it was tough deciding which statement to blog about.
In answer to a question on what our incipient Dear Leader would do after he destroys ISIS, we got this:
TRUMP: Sure. I mean, part of the problem that we’ve had is we go in, we defeat somebody, and then we don’t know what we’re doing after that. We lose it, like as an example, you look at Iraq, what happened, how badly that was handled. And then when President Obama took over, likewise, it was a disaster. It was actually somewhat stable. I don’t think could ever be very stable to where we should have never gone into in the first place.
But he came in. He said when we go out — and he took everybody out. And really, ISIS was formed. This was a terrible decision. And frankly, we never even got a shot. And if you really look at the aftermath of Iraq, Iran is going to be taking over Iraq. They’ve been doing it. And it’s not a pretty picture.
The — and I think you know — because you’ve been watching me I think for a long time — I’ve always said, shouldn’t be there, but if we’re going to get out, take the oil. If we would have taken the oil, you wouldn’t have ISIS, because ISIS formed with the power and the wealth of that oil.
LAUER: How were we going to take the oil? How were we going to do that?
TRUMP: Just we would leave a certain group behind and you would take various sections where they have the oil. They have — people don’t know this about Iraq, but they have among the largest oil reserves in the world, in the entire world.
And we’re the only ones, we go in, we spend $3 trillion, we lose thousands and thousands of lives, and then, Matt, what happens is, we get nothing. You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils. Now, there was no victor there, believe me. There was no victor. But I always said: Take the oil.
One of the benefits we would have had if we took the oil is ISIS would not have been able to take oil and use that oil…
(Emphasis Added)
It’s really hard to figure where to start with this one, but let’s focus on:
‘...but if we’re going to get out, take the oil’
So does Trump think we can just load Iraq’s oil wealth on a couple of tanker trucks and ‘take it’? Gee, even Matt ‘Soft-Balls’ Lauer did a double-take and followed up, unlike when Trump told his verified lie about opposing the Iraq war. Now we find out that it’s actually really easy:
Just we would leave a certain group behind and you would take various sections where they have the oil.
Oh, silly me, I get it now: In 2011, just before we pull all of our troops out of Iraq under the terms of the agreement negotiated and signed by W, President Obama is supposed to inform the Iraqi government — yes, that more-or-less legitimately elected government that we put in place — that rather than just leaving, we’re going to leave a ‘certain group’ behind in the sovereign nation of Iraq, and this force will just ‘take various sections’ where the Iraqis ‘have the oil’.
Yeah, wow, why didn’t that ever occur to me? Because I’m not a military genius like Agent Orange is, I guess.
But of course the Iraqis would see the genius in this plan, and wouldn’t just stand back and watch us walk off with 4.5 million barrels of oil per day, or whichever part of it we fancy — why, I suspect they would jump at the chance to assist us in this thievery. At least they would if Trump was president.
But wait! Did I hear you mention that ISIS got its start in Syria, not Iraq? And that the oil they used in the early days was pumped out of wells in Syria? Details, shmetails, I say! Iraq, Syria, it doesn’t matter, just take the oil!
OK, enough of the ‘take the oil’ idiocy. What about this ‘to the victors go the spoils’?
To my limited knowledge of history, the most recent attempt to collect war reparations was through the Versailles Treaty that ended WWI in 1918. Germany was forced to agree to hand over large portions of its industrial output, in an attempt to keep it too weak to conquer anyone. As I recall, this was a large element in the rise to power of a certain Austrian fellow. How’d that work out, anyway?
Of course, at the end of WWII, the Soviet Union took over Eastern Europe (more for a buffer than as spoils), while we implemented the Marshall Plan. Pretty easy to see who did better in that deal, I reckon.
When you look at war as a business deal, I suppose ‘winning’ requires getting more of something — a ‘better deal’.
Yeah, I get it now….. I always thought that war is a (somewhat messy) extension of diplomacy, but I was wrong.
War is merely a different type of business transaction!
And now you know it too.
Cheers.