“We should go in and stop this guy which would be very easy and very quick,” Trump said, calling for war so cavalierly that later, he couldn’t even remember that he did it! He thought regime change would be “quick and easy” years after the Iraq invasion. He was much more hawkish than many career politicians in Congress.

That brings us to Iraq, and more documented Trump lies.

Here is how Trump described his own record on Iraq during a GOP primary debate:

I am the only person on this dais—the only person—that fought very, very hard against us, and I wasn’t a sitting politician going into Iraq, because I said going into Iraq—that was in 2003, you can check it out, check out—I’ll give you 25 different stories. In fact, a delegation was sent to my office to see me because I was so vocal about it. I’m a very militaristic person, but you have to know when to use the military. I’m the only person up here that fought against going into Iraq.

Trump did not fight “very, very hard” against the invasion of Iraq. There is no public record of him fighting at all. He fabricated those 25 stories he promised about him fighting hard. They do not exist. He could have fought hard. He could have denounced the impending invasion during the long run-up to it on any number of mass media platforms, where he was interviewed and quoted repeatedly during that period. Barack Obama certainly opposed the war in that fashion.

Instead, Trump went on Howard Stern’s show in 2002 and said he guessed he was for the war. Then in 2003, on Fox News, he said that perhaps President Bush “shouldn’t be doing it yet. And perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations.” Any member of the public who cared what Donald Trump thought about invading Iraq, if there were any, would’ve surmised that he was a tepid war supporter who also favored letting the U.N. inspectors do their work before invading.

In fact, if they followed Trump closely, they would’ve known that in bygone years he had repeatedly declared that George H.W. Bush should have ousted Saddam Hussein.

As Andrew Kaczynski notes:

Donald Trump told Tony Snow in a Oct. 31, 1999 on Fox News Sunday about the first Gulf War: “No, I like the approach to the war, he did the right thing. He didn’t finish the war. I wish he’d finished the war.” In his book as well, Trump made the case Bush should have finished the job. “We can learn something here from George Bush and see how good a president he was,” Trump wrote in his 2000 book The America We Deserve. “He wasn’t afraid to use American power when he figured out that Saddam Hussein posed a direct threat to American interests in the East. I only wish, however, that he had spent three more days and properly finished the job. It is this kind of will and determination to use our strength strategically that America needs again in dealing with the North Koreans.” In that same book, Trump wrote that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction and targeted Iraq strikes had little effect on their overall weapons development. Trump concluded it wouldn’t be crazy if we attack Iraq to “carry the mission to its conclusion.”

Does that sound like someone who fought very, very hard to stop the war in Iraq, and who was smarter than all the elites who thought getting rid of Hussein was a good idea?