Remember what Trump said about the First Gulf War?
by digby
I had forgotten this gobbledygook statement during the campaign. It’s so bad it makes your head hurt. This is the man making life and death decisions in the Middle East today. And he isn’t even the slightest bit smarter than he was then:
Donald J. Trump said on Sunday that he wasn’t precisely sure what he meant in 2002 when he told the radio host Howard Stern that he wished the Persian Gulf war in 1991 had been “done correctly.”
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” as part of a round of interviews after his South Carolina primary victory on Saturday, Mr. Trump was pressed by the host, Chuck Todd, about the discussion with Mr. Stern, who asked him if he supported an invasion of Iraq a year after the Sept. 11 attacks. “Yes, I guess so,” Mr. Trump, who has spent his campaign saying he was an early and firm opponent of the Iraq war in 2003, told Mr. Stern.
In the Stern interview, unearthed by BuzzFeed, Mr. Trump added: “You know, I wish it was — I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
Mr. Trump, as Mr. Todd noted, did not sound as if he was strongly endorsing the 2003 war. But Mr. Todd pressed him as to what his second point meant.
“Well, what I mean by that,” Mr. Trump said, “is it almost shouldn’t have been done and, you know, I really don’t even know what I mean, because that was a long time ago and who knows what was in my head? I think that it wasn’t done correctly.”
Mr. Trump then offered a different thought.
“In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been done at all. It was sort of, you know, it was just done. It was just — we dropped bombs,” he said. “Now, if you look back, actually, that was probably the correct way of doing it, not going in and not upsetting, giving them a lesson or not.”
In the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Trump said, President George H.W. Bush “taught them a lesson,” adding, “What happened is he was taunted, because Saddam Hussein was saying we drove back the Americans, the ugly Americans were driven back, the power of Iraq, the power.”
He continued: “Well, we didn’t — weren’t driven back, he just decided not — General Schwarzkopf and others said, maybe let’s not go in, I’m not sure — although I think Schwarzkopf actually maybe wanted to go in. I think he made — maybe did the right thing.”
Seriously, why didn’t we just randomly pluck some High School drop-out off the street to run the most powerful nation on earth. It couldn’t have been any worse.
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