Trump gets Mideast history wrong
Add this to the things Donald Trump either lies about or doesn’t know.
In trying to outline how he would defeat the threat, Trump himself launched several other false claims on Monday…
TRUMP: “President Obama and Hillary Clinton should have never attempted to build a democracy in Libya, to push for immediate regime change in Syria or to support the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt.”
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THE FACTS: Trump seems to be confusing Obama and Clinton’s limited interventions, and sometimes non-interventions, with President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 regime-change efforts…
TRUMP on Clinton’s role in the Libya campaign: “With one episode of bad judgment after another, Hillary Clinton’s policies launched ISIS onto the world stage.”
THE FACTS: The U.S.-led military campaign in Libya created a security vacuum and political chaos. But it took three years before IS emerged in Iraq and Syria, and there is no connection between those developments…
TRUMP on the Iraq war: “I have been clear for a long time that we should not have gone in. But I have been just as clear in saying what a catastrophic mistake Hillary Clinton and President Obama made with the reckless way in which they pulled out.”
THE FACTS: Trump did publicly say he wanted U.S. troops out years earlier than Obama pulled them out.
He said in March 2007 the U.S. should declare victory and withdraw troops because Iraq was going to get further bogged down in civil strife.
He said the U.S. was “keeping a lid” on the situation by being there, but that when the U.S. leaves, “it’s all going to blow up” so the U.S. might as well leave “because you just are wasting time.”…
TRUMP: “I have long said that we should have kept the oil in Iraq … In the old days, when we won a war, to the victor belonged the spoils.”
THE FACTS: While Trump argues against nation-building, he seems to be suggesting the U.S. should have seized Iraq and its natural resources as an American colony. He ignores the fact that Iraq is a sovereign country and the U.S. at no point threatened to take possession of the country…
TRUMP on one of the San Bernardino shooters: “She wanted to support very openly jihad online… A neighbor saw suspicious behavior, bombs on the floor and other things, but didn’t warn authorities because they said they didn’t want to be accused of racial profiling.”
THE FACTS: There is no such evidence…
TRUMP: “I had previously said that NATO was obsolete because it failed to deal adequately with terrorism. Since my comments, they have changed their policy and now have a new division focused on terror threats.
THE FACTS: NATO established a Defense Against Terrorism program in 2004, long before Trump ran for president. And its latest efforts in Iraq were already under discussion when Trump criticized the alliance in March…
TRUMP: The Islamic State “has a new base of operations” in Libya.
THE FACTS: Islamic State militants have tried to establish such a base in the city of Sirte. But a U.S.-supported military offensive in Libya this year has all but driven the group out of its former headquarters there.
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