{"id":22858,"date":"2017-02-20T13:45:29","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T18:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22858"},"modified":"2017-02-20T13:45:29","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T18:45:29","slug":"mattis-were-not-in-iraq-to-seize-anybodys-oil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22858","title":{"rendered":"Mattis “We’re Not In Iraq To Seize Anybody’s Oil”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mattis “We’re Not In Iraq To Seize Anybody’s Oil”<\/a><\/h3>\n
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In the latest distancing by Trump administration advisors from recent statements by the President, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis arrived in Baghdad on an unannounced visit on Monday to discuss the war effort against ISIS, and said that the US military is not in Iraq “to seize anybody\u2019s oil.”\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n
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\nSecretary of Defence, James Mattis, arrives in Baghdad, February 20, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n

Speaking to a small group of reporters traveling with him, Mattis was\u00a0quoted by Reuters as saying\u00a0<\/a>\u201cI think all of us here in this room, all of us in America, have generally paid for our gas and oil all along and I\u2019m sure that we will continue to do so in the future.”\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

On his first trip to Iraq as Pentagon chief, Mattis is set to assess the war effort against the Islamic State as Iraqi forces launch a new push to evict ISIS militants from their remaining stronghold in the city of Mosul. In Iraq, he is likely to face questions about Trump’s remarks and actions, including a temporary ban on travel to the United States and for saying America should have seized Iraq’s oil after toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003. Trump told CIA staff in January: “We should have kept the oil. But okay. Maybe you’ll have another chance.”<\/p>\n

Trump later clarified his\u00a0position in an ABC interview<\/a>. The president said ISIS would not have become a global threat if it hadn\u2019t taken over Iraq\u2019s oil industry when the country was left weakened by the war.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe should\u2019ve kept the oil when we got out. And, you know, it\u2019s very interesting, had we taken the oil, you wouldn\u2019t have ISIS, because they fuel themselves with the oil. That\u2019s where they got the money. They got the money\u2026 when we left, we left Iraq, which wasn\u2019t a government.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mattis “We’re Not In Iraq To Seize Anybody’s Oil” In the latest distancing by Trump administration advisors from recent statements by the President, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis arrived in Baghdad on an unannounced visit on Monday to discuss the war effort against ISIS, and said that the US military is not in Iraq “to seize […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[7264,45,135,7844,442,446,14836,588,683,827,4318],"class_list":["post-22858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-geopolitics","tag-abc","tag-baghdad","tag-cia","tag-donald-trump","tag-iraq","tag-isis","tag-james-mattis","tag-oil","tag-reuters","tag-united-states","tag-zerohedge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22858"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22859,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22858\/revisions\/22859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}