 Donald Trump |
Affirming his belief that an independent can win the presidency in 2012, billionaire real estate tycoon and potential candidate Donald Trump pointed to his foreign policy prescience in an interview today with talk-radio host Michael Savage, noting he had warned that Iran would move immediately to seize power in Iraq when U.S. troops withdraw.
With the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq now complete, Iran’s mullah-led Shiite regime is poised to take over the oil-rich nation, Trump said, just as he had predicted.
He recalled he had said on numerous occasions that “the day we leave, Iraq is going to blow up.”
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Trump said he didn’t think it would literally take only one day, but “it turned out I was right.”
“You see what’s going on, where they want to arrest the vice president; they’re going to end up having a civil war,” said Trump.
Amid fear of sectarian strife between the majority Shiites and the minority Sunnis, an arrest warrant has been issued for Iraq’s Sunni vice-president, Tariq al-Hashemi, on terror charges.
“We will have spent $1.5 trillion for Iran to take over Iraq,” he said.
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Trump pointed out that Shiite Iran clearly has its eyes on Iraq’s oil reserves, believed to be the second largest in the world, after Saudi Arabia.
Citing the adage “to the victor goes the spoils,” Trump said the U.S. should have worked out a deal with Iraq to receive oil profits in exchange for its investment of money and lives in nine years of war.
At a minimum, he said, Iraq, with an estimated $15 trillion in oil reserves, should have paid back the $1.5 trillion it cost the U.S. to fight the war. The idea is among the policy prescriptions in Savage’s book “Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama’s Attack on Our Borders, Economy, and Security.”
Trump said that in addition, the families of each U.S. soldier killed should receive $5 million, and every badly wounded soldier should receive a couple of million.
Last week, Trump backed out of moderating a Republican debate after all but two candidates bowed out. Trump said the candidates, except for Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, were concerned that he would run for the White House as an independent after his hit TV show “The Apprentice” ends in May.
In his interview with Savage today, Trump repeated his assertion that if he runs as an independent he won’t siphon votes from the Republican candidate and hand Obama re-election.
“I’d rather not [run],” he told Savage, “but if the wrong Republican candidate gets chosen, which is possible – I mean I’m looking at what’s going on, like yo-yos, I’ve never seen anything like it – and if the economy continues to be bad, which it probably will, because I think we have an incompetent leader … I would certainly consider it.”
Trump argued that “people don’t love the Republicans, to put it mildly, and they certainly don’t love the Democrats, and I think at this time the right independent could absolutely win.”
He said he believes that if he runs, he will take more votes away from Obama than from the Republican candidate.
He insinuated that if he were to run, it would be a situation in which the Republicans couldn’t win anyway and he would have a good chance of beating Obama.
Savage’s show airs live Monday through Friday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern. It can be heard online through stations such as WTNT in the nation’s capital.
As WND reported, Savage’s show is ranked No. 2 in listenership among all talk-radio shows streamed on the Internet, according to Talk Stream Live.
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