ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Rudy Giuliani, advisor to Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, defended the candidate’s statement that the United States should have taken Iraq’s oil, saying that in war “anything is legal.”
“Leave a force back there and take it, but make sure it’s distributed in a proper way,” Giuliani said in an interview on Sunday with George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s This Week, when asked to explain an earlier statement from Trump arguing that the US should have taken Iraq’s oil.
When asked by Stephanopoulos if that was legal, Giuliani, a lawyer and former mayor of New York, chuckled while replying, “Of course it’s legal. It’s a war. Until the war is over, anything is legal.”
Last week, Trump said the US would have been right to “take the oil” in Iraq as a “spoil of war,” to keep it out of the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS).
“If we would have taken the oil, you wouldn’t have ISIS, because ISIS formed with the power and wealth of that oil,” Trump said during NBC News’ Commander-in-Chief Forum.
Giuliani explained Trump’s position that ISIS got rich off of oil and that, had the US secured it and held some control over its distribution, “we would not be dealing with ISIS today. They wouldn’t exist.”
He also said that distribution of oil was a major source of dispute among Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites -- another reason why Americans should have taken control of the resource.
But Giuliani did distance himself and Trump from the notion of taking the oil as a spoil of war. “He didn’t say we should take it for ourselves necessarily. He said we should secure it, so it doesn’t get taken by terrorist forces,” he explained in the interview.
