Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he opposed the Iraq War, even though he kind of supported it. Regardless, today he said that he was against it then, but if we had to fight it and win it, he would have done it differently. He would have taken the spoils.

I have long said that we should have kept the oil in Iraq – another area where my judgement has been proven correct. According to CNN, ISIS made as much $500 million in oil sales in 2014 alone, fueling and funding its reign of terror. If we had controlled the oil, we could have prevented the rise of ISIS in Iraq – both by cutting off a major source of funding, and through the presence of U.S. forces necessary to safeguard the oil and other vital infrastructure. I was saying this constantly and to whoever would listen: keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil, I said – don’t let someone else get it.

If they had listened to me then, we would have had the economic benefits of the oil, which I wanted to use to help take care of the wounded soldiers and families of those who died – and thousands of lives would have been saved.

This proposal, by its very nature, would have left soldiers in place to guard our assets. In the old days, when we won a war, to the victor belonged the spoils. Instead, all we got from Iraq – and our adventures in the Middle East – was death, destruction and tremendous financial loss.

The United States invaded a sovereign country in Iraq that had not invaded any other country, and had not declared war on the US. The reason of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was never proven. But regardless of whether the Iraq war was justified, Donald Trump is suggesting that the outcome should have been something other than liberation. “To the victor belonged the spoils.” That’s not liberation, that colonialism.

The US throughout its history has not raped and pillaged the countries that it has conquered. With the Marshall Plan, money streamed into Germany and Japan to rebuild their economies and infrastructure. Seventy years later, the US now has bases in both countries with their blessing, and they are some of our strongest allies and partners. Trump said that “our strategy of nation-building and regime change is a proven failure,” but he would have us creating colonies of our vanquished foes, mere captives to bleed their natural resources.

Sources:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/ap-fact-check-donald-trump-mideast-history/
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/donald-trump-thinks-america-was-too-nice-to-iraq/495971/