Trump’s false claim of opposing the Iraq War

He attacked Hillary Clinton’s judgment for voting for the Iraq war resolution, despite forgiving her for the same almost a decade ago.

Like all issues where Trump is supposed to be to Clinton’s “left”, this notion that he is to the left of her when it comes to worldwide conflicts is based on the idea that Trump actually has policy convictions that guide him regardless of whether new political opportunities arise.

Trump said he was “totally against the war in Iraq”. Don’t miss the excellent story in The Hill this week titled “Esquire mag: Trump lying about opposing the Iraq war”.

Trump’s idea is “so out of step with any plausible interpretation of US history or worldwide 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. “I opposed going in and I did oppose it, despite the media saying no, yes, no, I opposed going in and I opposed the reckless way Hillary Clinton took us out, along with President Obama, letting ISIS fill that big bad void”. “Three months before the Iraq war started, I said in an interview with Neil Cavuto that perhaps we shouldn’t be doing it yet”. The billionaire businessman only began to voice doubts about the conflict well after it began in March 2003.

The newspaper’s formal endorsement of the former secretary of state comes a day after it published an editorial saying it would not back Trump in 2016, ending a streak of endorsing every Republican presidential nominee since 1968. “For years I’ve been a critic of these kinds of reckless, foreign invasions and interventions that have been a hallmark of trigger-happy Hillary and her failed career”.

Donald Trump’s current campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, visited with Charlie Rose on CBS This Morning to chat on a number of subjects. And yet today he chose to insist, throwing out evidence that’s already been scrutinized, he was always opposed to the war.

But he also said about a Howard Stern interview, “It was the first time anybody had asked me about Iraq, and I said, “I don’t know”.

“We shouldn’t be there!” said Trump.

“I wish I could tell you all the ways it would be illegal and not kosher”, said Steven R. Ratner, a University of MI law professor. Trump responded, “Yeah, I guess so”. I don’t even know why I was asked the question.

“In Iraq, my judgment was right, and hers, with all of this information and all of this great intelligence information was wrong”, he continued.

Donald Trump is insisting he opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, even though fact checkers have repeatedly said that claim is false.

Liebel studies terrorism and USA policy and reviewed both Trump’s and Clinton’s statements from this week’s televised forum about how they would deal with ISIS. “If we’re going to have lost that many people in Iraq, we should have something to say about how that oil is distributed”. It was aimed at rebutting Clinton’s arguments that she would be best positioned to lead the military and reassuring Republicans who have openly anxious that his provocative statements might undermine US alliances. But the United States never blatantly fought a war simply to appropriate oil for itself. “All this for nothing!”

But securing the oil fields across the country to make sure ISIS couldn’t get its hands on any of it would require a force bigger than the one the Bush administration sent to take over the country.

Reality: Trump did criticize the war in the Esquire interview. “He said he wasn’t ― you can go back and look at the record”.

TRUMP: I might do that. “I was opposed to the war from the beginning”. If she wants to do, I’ll do it 100%.