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Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop on April 20 in Indianapolis. | AP Photo Trump: U.S. better off ignoring the Middle East

The United States would have been better off "if we never looked at the Middle East for the last 15 years,” Donald Trump said on Thursday.

"One of the things that -- running for office is interesting. They'll ask you questions like that," Trump said during a town-hall discussion on NBC's "Today." "I said that from the beginning. They never did it. Then they started it, on a limited basis. Libya, right now, as you know, has fantastic oil, some of the finest oil in the world. Who has the oil? ISIS has the oil. Do we blockade it, bomb it, do anything? No. ISIS is making a fortune now in Libya."

Trump called the widening chaos in Libya "a Hillary Clinton deal," referring to her push for the intervention as secretary of state.

"For what reason? Look, he was a bad guy. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. They had one thing in common. They killed terrorists, OK?" Trump said. "We would have been better off if we never looked at the Middle East for the last 15 years."

Clinton has defended her activism on Libya, but emphasized in the most recent Democratic debate that the ultimate call to intervene rested with her then-boss, President Barack Obama.

"The decision was the president's. Did I do the due diligence? Did I talk to everybody I could talk to? Did I visit every capitol and then report back to the president?" she said. "Yes, I did. That's what a secretary of state does. But at the end of the day, those are the decisions that are made by the president to in any way use American military power, and the president made that decision and, yes, we did try without success because of the Libyans' obstruction to our efforts, but we did try and we will continue to try to help the Libyan people."