Also not normal: threatening allies when we have troops on the ground with them
In my last post, I included this line:
You can’t put the fear of Trump into Iraq by saying you want to take their oil, and then get, say, Pakistan to help you fight ISIS in Iraq.
There is a ton to unpack here, so I decided to do it in a separate post. Most of this info comes from two segments on the Rachel Maddow show.
Iraq is one of the two countries where ISIS has the strongest presence. It’s also one where the US has troops on the ground, right now, fighting ISIS alongside Iraqi troops. The US troops are very few in number compared to the Iraqi ones; they act as advisers, provide air support, things like that. Many of us probably have mixed feelings about their being there, but it’s an incontrovertible fact that they’re there, they’re in harm’s way, and they’re making progress.
Example--they (meaning Iraqi troops with US help) just liberated the eastern half of the city of Mosul. Mosul is Iraq’s second-largest city, and it’s been in ISIS control for years. All the schools were shut down, people were afraid to go out in the streets, food supplies were limited, people were burning their furniture to keep warm, the whole bit. Now half of it--the part east of the Tigris river--has been liberated, schools are reopening, they’ve definitely still got problems, but things are better. Plans are being made to cross the river and liberate the other half, too.
Pretty much simultaneously with this great thing happening, Trump stands up in front of the CIA and says, “We should have kept the oil--maybe you’ll get another chance.”
First thing to note here is that what Trump is proposing is a war crime. At that link, you can see the actual text of provisions it violates in the 1907 Hague Convention, the 1947 Geneva Convention, and a 1974 UN resolution. This proposal (which Trump also made several times during the campaign and before) is not business savvy, it is a war crime, full stop.
So, yeah. Instead of the US and Iraq working together to fight ISIS (and winning!) we now have Iraqis wondering if US troops are really there to steal oil, and and US troops watching their backs in case Iraqi troops decide to preemptively stop them from doing so.
What’s ISIS doing, meanwhile? Whatever the hell they want.
Trump thinks he’s making himself look strong by talking tough. What he’s actually doing is threatening an ally, endangering US troops, and increasing tensions in an already volatile region.
In his ABC interview a day or two later, after he’d had time to become informed about how dangerous it was for a President to say what he said, he was given the opportunity to walk it back. Instead, he repeated “we should have kept the oil,” and waved off the dangers by saying that the world, and Muslims in particular, are already “as angry as it gets,” and couldn’t get angrier.
