Trump misses Hussein and Gaddafi
So, Republican front runner, Donald Trump, told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the world would be a better place if only we wouldn’t have disrupted the regimes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, according to Reuters.
“You can make the case, if you look at Libya, look at what we did there, it’s a mess,” Trump said on NBC.
“If you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look what we did there, it’s a mess. It’s going to be the same thing” in Syria, he said.
Asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd if the Middle East would be more stable with Gaddafi and Saddam in power, Trump replied, “Of course it would be.”
Well, you know, Europe was fairly stable under Napoleon, too. Yugoslavia was certainly more stable under Tito than it has been in recent years. The Soviet Union was stable under Stalin and the Communists. Mao sure stabilized China, too. Just ask the millions of victims of state-sponsored starvation.
Before we ousted Hussein in 2003, he was the most destabilizing influence in the Middle East – he’d started a ten-year war with Iran, invaded Kuwait, paid bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel and murdered his own citizens by the thousands. We had to fly over those citizens to protect them from him for more than ten years – while Hussein was taking pot shots at our aircraft with surface-to-air missiles. He massed his troops on the Kuwait border twice after the Gulf War causing the US to deploy troops to our prepositioned equipment in Kuwait. When Hussein was toppled, Gaddafi figured that he was next in the war against terror and gave up his own weapons of mass destruction.
Gaddafi had bombed the LaBelle Disco in Berlin to kill US soldiers out on the town. He also bombed a commercial aircraft over Lockerbie, Scotland. Yeah, that’s some real stability.
Trump is just mouthing populist BS, attracting the Ron Paulians to his campaign, but he’s dividing the party, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think he’s trying to make the party lose next year. Actually, I don’t know better, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for the time being.
Category: Dumbass Bullshit
It is consistent with Trumps ME foreign policy.
His policy which I understood him to state:
“I will get along with Putin. Because Putin and I will get along. Because Putin will get along with me. And I will get along with Putin.” Elegantly simple.
Thing is, Putin eats guys like Trump for lunch. Trump may be able to stage a “hostile takeover” but Putin assassinates people with polonium poisoning. In other words, Putin will continue to out-maneuver Trump just like he has with Obama over the last 7 yrs…
Serious question: Is there any candidate running who says that fighting a war to remove Saddam Hussein from power was a good idea?
I think it was, and I was very glad to play a minor part in the war effort myself, but that is not my question. Is anyone running now who will say that forthrightly?
My reading of the last two Presidential elections is that the candidates treated the issue as “toxic for Republicans” and kept as quiet about it as possible. (And given how unpopular the war became later, they may be right about that.)
I think the closest recently is Governor Bush saying his brother “kept us safe”.
Agreed on the war, and on the minor part I was happy to play therein.
I think the closest any of the candidates get to supporting the war is that, knowing what we know today, it was not the right choice, thus implying that because we did NOT know what we know today, it might have been the right decision. Rubio says that explicitly, that knowing only what we knew then, it was a good decision, but that if we knew the true state of his WMD program, we should have just contained him instead. Which is fucking stupid – maintaining the status quo was not an option available to us. The sanctions were crumbling, and if we had waited even another year, he’d have been out of his box. The choices were to take him out, or to let him win the decade-old cold war.
But yeah, the Republican party has fully abandoned a good and vital war. Can’t say I’m surprised, but I am disappointed.
If we had left those two in power it would have sucked for the Iraqis and Libyans. Not that it doesn’t suck for them now. We knocked off two dictators only to visit anarchy on the survivors. We tured two shitty places into two totally destroyed shitty places. Once again the military won the war and the politicians lost the peace. For all it’s worth, it was a waste of American lives and money for people not worth the cost.
Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The A-rabs are not amenable to western-style democracy and all the blue ink in the world won’t change that. Disparate groups with disparate and competing interests sharing a common area have to be controlled–or else. We screwed up in Iraq not by eliminating Hussein. He had it coming. Where we screwed up was eliminating the Ba’athists, the only party with people who could run the show there. As for Mallomar/Molar/Whatever, that was all obama–and it still is.
My ex wife seemed like a good idea at the time. Now? Notsomuch.
IMHO, we should have stayed as far away from the ME as possible. Tomahawk effective range seems a good distance.
Agreed 2/17 Air Cav. Your comments remind me of this article, it’s a good read on the Iraq War and the rise of ISIS:
http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=6782
The failure in Iraq was abandoning the mission the way that we did. Despite strong warnings of what would happen, the detractors were simply painted as irrelevant…
Leaving Hussein in power? Sure, Iraq was somewhat stable. So was Germany under Hitler.
Libya was the direct result of the “Arab Spring”, a wonderful idea built on the promise of Americas support, which turned out to be some wordy speeches, and a whole lot of money wasted. Not to mention the life of an Ambassador, a couple former SEALs, and embassy staffer.
Getting tired of trump. I really wish there was someone who could overpower the shadow he has cast on the entire campaign.
I’d disagree in part, Jonn. Regarding Iraq: IMO there was a valid strategic argument for the US invading Iraq both times. Hussein saw himself as a modern day secular Saladin; he wanted to establish Iraq as ruler of the Gulf region. By 1990, he’d already proven himself to be an unstable, murderous thug willing to gas and torture his own people, and to ruin huge sectors of his own country to further his interests. Allowing such an ruthless, evil man with demonstrated desire for regional domination and a propensity for genocide to come into possession of the resources of the entire ME was decidedly NOT in the USA’s best interests. We therefore committed military force to prevent that, then again to permanently remove the threat. In short, Trump is full of it regarding Iraq. There was good reason to go to Iraq. One might not agree it was a good enough reason, but the reason was nonetheless extant and sound. In contrast, after El Dorado Canyon Qaddafi was essentially isolated and neutered. Between our whacking his PP (and damn near taking him out) and the “Revolution within a Revolution” that followed, Qadaffi essentially had his hands full. Seeing the US kick Hussein’s butt in Iraq was an abject lesson; by the late 1990s, Qadaffi appears to have essentially gotten out of the terrorist business (Lockerbie a decade earlier may well have been his last significant such operation). Qadaffi denounced the 9/11 attacks, admitted Libya’s role in Lockerbie, and paid literally billions in compensation. Yeah, Qadaffi was erratic and flighty as well as a hard, ruthless bastard. Rulers in that part of the world from 1970 to the present generally seem to have been like that. But I can’t see how we had any real national interest in helping boot him out of power in 2011. Green-lighting his overthrow simply set up a follow-on regime that was no better, and in fact appears to have left al Qaeda allies in control of much of Libya (as well as many of the former Libyan Armed Forces’ weapons stocks). Doing that was decidedly… Read more »
Excellent comment, Hondo. Though it leaves me with my question above, and the answers so far:
If all the other candidates are saying Iraq was a bad idea period, or a bad idea that looked good at the time, or are avoiding the issue, then it looks as if they are all agreed not to intervene in cases like that in the future. Which doesn’t make this a good issue to differentiate Trump from the other candidates.
Paying attention to the news this morning, Hondo?
Seems Shrillary’s emails reveal that they wanted to let Qadaffi twist in the wind in 2011 by ignoring any attempts at the Libyans to reach out to this administration.
And Clinton or not, she wouldn’t have cut him off without express permission from the White House.
Curiouser and curiouser.
I won’t give him the doubt. Guy talks a good game, but at the end of the day, all he’s doing is feeding raw meat to the idiots on the extremes.
People are tired of illegal immigration, taxes, debt, deficit, etc., but his plans are pretty sophomoric, and I’m being kind.
Trump served a purpose, bringing illegal immigration, taxes and debt and deficit out in the open, and forcing certain candidates to talk about those subjects. Look how well it’s turned out for Jeb.
I just find it difficult to believe that so many people have signed on to any candidate at this early date. There’s a year to go, roughly, before the conventions, 5 or 6 months before the first primaries or caucusi. Certainly, no rush to start with the “if __________ isn’t the nominee, I’m taking my marbles to the basement and staying home for the election”.
Trump misses two assholes who committed crimes against humanity and killed how many American Soldiers?
???
I’m absolutely without a doubt positive that there’s plenty of room in the ocean they dumped the murders in. Take a flying fuck off another countries boat and have a wonderful reunion. BYE BYE ? ?
Iraq, no. Libya, yes.
While Jonn is correct that Gaddafi was responsible for Berlin & Lockerbie, consider the timing. After we invaded Iraq in 2003, and (finally) captured Hussein, Gaddafi saw the light and gave up his nuclear program (by all accounts further along than we thought; no surprise there). Basically he agreed to play nice and not cause any more trouble, to which agreement he adhered until the Democrats instigated his murder a few years ago.
A similar argument can be made for Egypt under Mubarak; we should have left him alone, given the (later) radical Morsi. We can easily view the government of el-Sisi as a continuation of Mubarak.
I really don’t see the overriding strategic need to expel Assad from Syria, and given Obama’s feckless performance we are now worse off than we were a few years ago. A similar argument can be made for Libya and Egypt.
Agreed, but I think you’re a bit off in placing where Qadaffi turned.
Qadaffi was one of the first (if not the first) Arab/ME leader to publicly disavow 9/11. He came out strongly in support of the US and against that terrorist act almost immediately afterwards. Published accounts also indicate he began sharing intel data with the US concerning international terrorism at that time. This – coupled with his near complete cessation of major terrorist activity after Lockerbie – indicates to me that the First Gulf War was the final “eye opener” that caused him to reassess his support for radical Islamic causes.
Additional examples where we “screwed the pooch” during the Arab Spring are Yemen and (arguably) Tunisia. In both cases, we stood by and watched a pro-Western government go down the tubes to internal unrest fostered by radical Islamic elements.
I bow to your knowledge on this one; I was going by memory.
Agreed with the other examples.
The republican party is heavily fragmented and divided even without Trump. A good many of us are not republicans anymore, because that party neither represents us, nor does it show any spine at all in dealing with socialist democrats. That is one reason why Boehner is out. Hopefully McConnell will not be far behind, and that might get some of the establishment republicans to unfuck themselves.
But I doubt it.
Looks like maybe a good episode of Frontline tonight. “My Brothers Bomber” about pan am flight 103.