In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union program on Monday, Donald Trump gave a long interview touching on many of his policy stances, including the most recent Mexican judge snafu dominating the headlines.
One short line of questioning caught my attention, a position that I had not heard Trump espouse before and one that shines another light on his complete lack of understanding of world politics and foreign policy. He thinks that Iran is taking over Iraq. Here is the Trump’s quote from the above video, taken from a the transcript.
“So, I was against the [Iraq] war a long time ago, and it destabilized the Middle East. And that’s exactly what I said was going to happen.
And I also said Iran will take over Iraq, because we ruined the balance of those two militarily. We destroyed — we knocked out one of the two balancing prongs. And Iran is taking — as sure as you’re sitting there, Iran is taking over Iraq.
They’re taking over the oil. They’re taking over everything.”
Trump provided no evidence that this is happening. This is not a prophecy that Trump is so fond of making, this statement is in the present tense: “Iran is taking over Iraq.”He neglected to mention that the current Iraq government and army is propped up by the might of the US military.
Iraq is a sovereign country and owns all of its oil. According to factcheck.org, Iraq produced a record amount of oil last year, making it the second largest producer of oil in OPEC. Part of this increase comes from the Iraqi government being able to retake some oil fields from ISIS.
This is another example of Donald Trump lying to America causing unnecessary fear and showing his deep misunderstanding of the reality of global politics.
Sources:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaNWST8ij7I
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1606/05/sotu.01.html
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/trump-wrong-on-iraqi-oil/
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