During his campaign Donald Trump said if elected he will “bomb the shit” out of the Islamic State. He will send troops into Syria and Iraq if the Pentagon agrees.
“Unfortunately, it may require boots on the ground to fight the Islamic State,” he writes in Crippled America (2015).
“I don’t think it’s necessary to broadcast our strategy. (In fact, one of the most ridiculous policy blunders President Obama has committed was to announce our timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.) If military advisers recommend it, we should commit a limited–but sufficient–number of troops to fight on the ground.”
“I would end ISIS forcefully,” he said during an interview with 60 Minutes. “We are going to convey my top generals and give them a simple instruction,” he told a crowd in North Carolina in September. “They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS. We have no choice.”
From his web page, “Foreign Policy and Defeating ISIS”:
Pursue aggressive joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS, international cooperation to cutoff their funding, expand intelligence sharing, and cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting.
Another bullet point: “Defeat the ideology of radical Islamic terrorism just as we won the Cold War.”
I assume this means severing ties with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf emirates responsible for supporting Salafist terrorism. “Who blew up the World Trade Center? It wasn’t the Iraqis, it was Saudi—take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents,” he told Fox News in February.
But is he serious? Records submitted to the Federal Election Commission show companies incorporated by Trump are related to a possible hotel project in Jeddah, the second largest city in Saudi Arabia.
Trump sounds like a Democrat on Afghanistan. “We made a mistake going into Iraq. I’ve never said we made a mistake going into Afghanistan,” he said. “And at this point, you probably have to stay because that thing will collapse about two seconds after they leave.”
He believes Obama should have gone into Syria. “Had he crossed the line and really gone in with force, done something to Assad–if he had gone in with tremendous force, you wouldn’t have millions of people displaced all over the world.”
Trump is on the neocon bandwagon in regard to Iran. “We have people in Washington that don’t know what they’re doing. Now, with Iran, we’re making a deal, you would say, we want out our prisoners. We want all these things, and we don’t get anything. We’re giving them $150 billion dollars plus. I’ll tell you what, if Iran was a stock, you folks should go out and buy it right now because you’ll quadruple–this, what’s happening in Iran, is a disgrace, and it’s going to lead to destruction in large portions of the world.”
Obama didn’t give $150 billion to Iran. Iranian money and assets were frozen after the US and Israel said Iran is building a nuclear weapon. Iran has not developed a nuclear weapon, there is no evidence of this. The United States began imposing sanctions on Iran after the CIA-installed Shah was overthrown. Trump will maintain the status quo. He may even “bomb the shit” out of Iran’s oil fields.
He has called for bombing oil infrastructure in the Middle East. “I’d just bomb those suckers,” he said last year. “I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.”
Trump also wants to steal the oil. He wanted to steal it before ISIS appeared on the scene. “You heard me, I would take the oil,” he said in 2011. “I would not leave Iraq and let Iran take the oil.”
“We go in, we spend $3 trillion, we lose thousands and thousands of lives, and then … what happens is we get nothing. You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils,” he said in September.
He also talked about stealing Libya’s oil during the NATO invasion in 2011. “I would just go in and take the oil,” he told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News.
This is would be a violation of international law (specifically, the fourth Geneva Convention) and a war crime, but like the neocons Donald Trump does not recognize international law.
Donald Trump has courted neocons and other warmongers, including John Bolton. “You are fooling yourselves if you think Trump, who has advisers such as Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Peter Navarro and Michael Flynn, has some libertarian inclinations,” writes Robert Wenzel.
As president, he would be a neo-con leaning tyrant. He would just go to war for other reasons… Sheldon Adelson isn’t supporting him for nothing.
Interminable war will continue under Donald Trump. The troops will not come home. He has promised to jack-up defense spending. He wants to go after Islam.
I wrote a detailed explanation in August.
