“Donald Trump: ‘Had we taken the oil, you wouldn’t have ISIS'”

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/26/politics/trump-oil-isis-iraq/index.html

I’m deeply uncomfortable with President Trump’s notion that we should have seized Iraq’s oil and his hint that we might still find an opportunity to do so.

Leaving aside the ethical issues, such a practice would make us look like a nation of pirates, because we would be acting piratically, and would seem to confirm accusations that we really don’t care about freedom and justice but are simply greedy and rapacious colonialists.  We would be generating enormous hatred in the Middle East, and putting targets on the backs of our soldiers even more than we already have.  I believe that it would vastly increase the dangers even to ordinary Americans traveling, living, and working in the Middle East and the Islamic world.

And so forth.  This is a dangerous idea.