Donald Trump said last night:
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...
Yes, he has said that before:
“I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me. … I would bomb the shit out of ‘em. … I’d blow up the pipes. I’d blow up the — I’d blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left. And you know what, you get Exxon to come in there and in two months — you ever see these guys how good they are? The great oil companies? They’ll rebuild that sucker brand new. It’ll be beautiful. And I’d bring it, and I’d take the oil.”We've seen what he's actually calling for, before; in Kuwait, in 1991. Kuwait is still suffering from that economic and environmental catastrophe. And what Trump is calling for would actually be worse.
The Rumaila oil field in Iraq is a super-giant oil field (no, that's a term of art, not hyperbole). The land is actually owned by the government of Iraq and has been since 1961. Donald Trump thinks we should have taken it after our invasion of Iraq in this century, and left troops behind to protect it and control it. Of course, he also thinks we should have utterly destroyed the petroleum infrastructure there and throughout Iraq (which has an estimated 143 billion barrels of oil), and that Exxon could rebuild it in two months.
The oil wells in Kuwait burned for 11 months. Imagine the damage if you blew up "every single inch" of the Rumalla field alone. Imagine the catastrophe of that on the 3rd largest oil field in the world. Imagine how long it would take to extinguish the resulting fires, then clean up the debris, then rebuild. If you imagine "two months," you are living in a child's dreamworld alongside Donald Trump.
I mention this because it is no minor thing, and yet it will get no attention at all. We will focus on what Trump said about men and women in the military (appalling, I agree), or his double super-secret plan to win the war against ISIS which the generals he wants to fire will give him, or just how much he thinks of Vladimir Putin.
We won't focus on this answer, in this forum, which was meant to show whether or not Trump is qualified to be commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces.
The answer is: he is not. That is literally beyond argument.
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