Less than a fortnight ago, the new United States leader publicly repeated a startling phrase that had become common enough during his blunt and divisive campaign to reach the White House. Donald Trump casually declared he would have conducted the 2003 invasion of Iraq differently and “kept the oil.”
Introducing his pick Mike Pompeo to head the country’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) this January, President Trump admitted, “Now I said it for economic reasons,” in a televised address at the service’s Langley, Virginia headquarters.
He mused, “The old expression, ‘To the victor belong the spoils’- you remember I always used to say, ‘Keep the oil?’ I wasn’t a fan of Iraq. I don’t want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you, when we were in, we got out wrong.”
Turning to face his nominee and gesticulating with his right hand, the businessman pondered, “But if you think about it, Mike, if we kept the oil, you probably wouldn’t have (the Islamic State terror group) ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place – so we should have kept the oil.”
The 45th President looked back at the room of CIA staffers and his language became rather ominous, “Okay, maybe you’ll have another chance. But the fact is, (we) shoulda kept the oil.” The Kansas representative on the Republican National Committee, Pompeo was confirmed two days later by the U.S. Senate.
Slamming the Commander-in-Chief’s comments as “morally repugnant” the Atlantic Magazine cautioned that his utterances in the space of seconds are “certain to be exploited as a recruiting tool by America’s terrorist enemies” and are “likely to help foreign adversaries diminish America’s reputation and power.” It warned, “For the sake of an indisciplined, self-indulgent riff, Trump made Americans less safe.”
“When Trump made statements like this as a private citizen they could be safely ignored. Now that he is President they have immediate, global consequences,” the website noted.
Yet the slippery three letter word has stuck in the magnate’s mind for years, like the accompanying long favoured themes of “taking” or “keeping” the oil.
The American Conservative publication, National Review, reported Trump felt that the U.S. should claim “victory and leave” Iraq since 2007, “because I’ll tell you, this country is just going to get further bogged down.”
Four years on, as President Barack Obama prepared to withdraw soldiers, Trump was more or less getting his wish. “But by then he appeared to be arguing that the U.S. should maintain its troop presence simply to seize Iraqi oil fields. ‘So you would keep troops in Iraq after this year?’ asked Wall Street Journal reporter Kelly Evans. ‘I would take the oil,’ Trump responded.”
A confused Evans sought a clarification, “You heard me – I would take the oil,” Trump insisted. “I would not leave Iraq and let Iran take the oil.” The Review said a week after, he elaborated, suggesting that America’s losses in Iraq deserved compensation in the form of Iraqi oil.
“In the old days, you know when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils,” he advised journalist and former Democratic political advisor, George Stephanopoulos in 2011. “You go in. You win the war and you take it…. You’re not stealing anything. . . . We’re taking back US$1.5 trillion to reimburse ourselves.”
Following his interview with Stephanopolous, he maintained that American policy towards the uprising in Libya should also focus on “taking the oil,” the Review said. Trump confessed to correspondent, lawyer Greta Van Susteren. “We don’t know who the rebels are, we hear they come from Iran, we hear they’re influenced by Iran or al-Qaeda, and, frankly I would go in, I would take the oil — and stop this baby stuff.” He would soon acknowledge, “I’m only interested in Libya if we take the oil. If we don’t take the oil, I’m not interested.”
In his July 2015 online article titled “Donald Trump’s Odd Fixation on Seizing Middle Eastern Oil Fields,” the Review’s blogger and commentator, Jim Geraghty questioned the “bizarre, bellicose fantasy” of the real estate businessman who was then among the bold political hopefuls seeking the coveted Republican Party nomination.
Uncanny
“He’s loud, he’s brash, and he’s got an uncanny ability to spark outrage and controversy just by opening his mouth. His is a reality-show candidacy for a reality-show age, and his pitch to voters fits it to a tee: heavy on personality and light on policy. Those stances he does take have a superficial populist appeal — quite a substantial one if the polls are to be believed — but tend to fall apart on closer inspection,” Geraghty observed.
Well Trump proved victorious in the end and is now at the chaotic helm of a superpower, struggling with growing strife and widening rifts. Not even a month into the raucous Presidency, his bruising administration’s long list of contentious views and radical plans are only just beginning to be implemented, promising an unprecedented shake-up of the American landscape and psyche. The accelerating fallout from some disputed measures, like his recent immigration order banning citizens from an initial seven predominantly Muslim countries for a three month trial period, is already triggering growing protests, strong dissent, legal action and outright condemnation from refugee paupers and seasoned diplomats to his predecessor President.
A familiar refrain “We should have kept the oil,” featured in the middle of an earlier speech on radical Islam and national security that he delivered last August in Youngstown, Ohio. According to the Atlantic, Trump hammered home his point about the natural resource’s importance. “I was saying this constantly and consistently to whoever would listen. I said: Keep the oil! Keep the oil! Keep the oil!” affirming “Don’t let someone else get it.” He decried, “Instead, all we got from Iraq—and our adventures in the Middle East—was death, destruction and tremendous financial loss.”
Trump’s obsession with taking Iraq’s oil encapsulates the broader vision of national security that he laid out, the journal stated. America, he repeated, has been too nice—to its enemies, immigrants, and the nations it invades. “We will be tough, and we will even be extreme,” he promised, describing the “ideological screening test” potential immigrants would have to pass as “extreme vetting.”
As for the support networks that would-be terrorists turn to in the U.S, Trump vowed that they would be “stripped out and removed one by one—viciously if necessary” but he did not specify how.
In his 2011 book, “Time to Get Tough,” re-issued as a paperback in 2015, Trump launched the personal manifesto that would become the rousing platform for his political ambitions, with the usual personal candour. (Libyan leader Muammar) “Qadaffi is dead and gone. So what? We have spent more than US$1 billion on the Libya operation. And what are we getting in return? A huge bill, that’s what. It’s incredible how foolish the Obama administration is. Libya has enormous oil reserves. When the so-called ‘rebels’ came to NATO (which is really the U.S.) and asked for help to defeat Qadaffi, we should have said, ‘Sure, we don’t like the guy either. We will help you take out Qadaffi. But in exchange, you give us 50 percent of your oil for the next 25 years to pay for our military support and to say thank you for the United States doing what you could never have done on your own.’ The ‘rebels’ would have jumped at the offer and said yes.”
“Imagine the amount of oil we could have secured for America. Our policy should be: no oil, no military support,” he vented, contending that “Until we get this country’s lifeblood – oil- back down to reasonable rates, America’s economy will continue to slump, jobs won’t get created, and American consumers will face ever-increasing prices.”
Rudimentary
When the fact-finding portal PolitiFact examined the accuracy of his “take and keep” claims in September, numerous experts ruled that trying to seize Iraqi oil would not be legal, feasible, or desirable. The idea is “so out of step with any plausible interpretation of U.S. history or international law that they should be dismissed out of hand by anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of world affairs,” said Lance Janda, a Military Historian at Cameron University.
“This is the sort of thing colonial empires, and the U.S. did in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and it’s since been denounced as imperialism,” Janda remarked. “Are we the good guys or not? Because if we are, and if we want to convince the world we are, then we can’t go around invading countries and stealing their oil. The long-term damage to our reputation would be irrevocable.”
Associate Director of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, Barnett Rubin reflected, “In so far as Mr. Trump’s proposals are coherent enough to be subject to analysis and judgment, they appear to be practically impossible, legally prohibited, and politically imbecilic.”
The Atlantic’s correspondent Conor Friedersdorf wondered, “Can Trump get it together to govern with even a modicum of competence? So far this is what amateur hour looks like when it is voted into the White House on the strength of celebrity, bluster, and an opponent with decades of poor decisions and corruption as baggage. Trump doesn’t appear to recognize his needless, totally avoidable error. America would benefit if the people around him demanded more discipline and told their erratic boss to stop shooting off his mouth. Its safety hangs in the balance.”
ID speculates about President Donald Trump’s foreign policy doctrine from his book, based on tenets including “1. American interests come first. Always. No apologies. 2. Maximum firepower and military preparedness. 3. Only go to war to win.”
