Trump on 2002 Iraq Support: ‘Who Knows What Was In My Head’

Republican primary front-runner Donald Trump on Sunday said he does not know what he was trying to say during a 2002 interview in which he supported the Iraq invasion. “You know, I wish the first time it was done correctly”.

Trump’s scathing criticism of the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq sets him apart from the other Republican presidential candidates. You said ‘Yeah, I guess so. That position, Trump suggested, demonstrated the quality of his judgment – after all, 48 out of 49 Republican senators voted in favor of the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002, so opposing the invasion was far from a mainstream Republican stance at the time.

Donald Trump has made his alleged opposition to the war in Iraq a central theme of his presidential campaign.

Now, Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed has unearthed a 2002 statement by Trump in which he said the US should invade Iraq.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You said you were for the invasion. “I think he said something much softer than was originally reported by the media”. “And later, I was really against it”.

The Iraq War issue first flared up in Saturday’s Republican debate, when Trump clashed with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush over Middle East policy.

“He went in, he taught them a lesson”, Trump said.

He added that he believed that any global objections to the war would not endanger American’s economy. “That was the first time I think that question was ever even asked of me”. “We now know in hindsight, those intelligence reports were false”. But that was said long after the war started – and Iraq was unraveling under the USA occupation. “And when you go in and you remove one of those dictators, unless you have an appropriate plan for replacing them, you’re going to have chaos”.

Bretherton’s colleague Paul Griffiths, a professor of Catholic theology, was a bit more nuanced: “Donald Trump’s proposal isn’t consistent with deep Christian understandings of the movements of peoples across border; that, in turn, is perfectly consistent with Trump himself being a Christian – which is to say someone baptized in the triune name”.