Former New York mayor and close Trump ally discusses Republican nominee’s call to take Iraq’s oil, a move which appears to break international law

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has argued that “anything is legal” in war, defending Donald Trump’s call to “take the oil” of Iraq, one of the Republican nominee’s proposals that appears to violate international law.

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Giuliani has become one of Trump’s closest advisers and steadiest allies in a campaign shaken by controversy, turnover and the nominee’s own unpredictability. In an interview broadcast on Sunday he tried to explain how Trump’s call to “take the oil” of Iraq fit with the nominee’s past demands to “declare victory and leave” and reduce American intervention abroad.

“Leave a force back there, and take it, and make sure it’s distributed in a proper way,” Giuliani told ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos.

“That’s not legal, is it?” the host asked.

“Of course it’s legal – it’s war,” Giuliani answered, laughing. “Until the war is over, anything is legal.”

Giuliani’s remarks follow a string of dismissals of international law by Trump, who last week suggested the US should have seized Iraqi oil deposits for its own profit.

“It used to be ‘to the victor belong the spoils’,” Trump said in a televised NBC forum. “Now, there was no victor there, believe me. There was no victor. But I always said: take the oil.”

The Republican nominee has also proposed killing the families of terror suspects and a return to torture. Those policies and “taking the oil” would likely violate the Geneva Convention, experts say.

Giuliani, a former prosecutor who won two terms as mayor on a platform of stopping crime, has said he does not believe waterboarding, a practice used by the CIA during the Bush administration, is necessarily torture. “It depends on how it’s done,” he said in 2007. “It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.”

On Sunday, he argued that Trump was in fact not talking about “spoils” for the US with his demand for oil. “He hasn’t said we should take it for ourselves, necessarily,” he said. “We should secure it so it doesn’t get taken by terrorist forces so we can have some say over the distribution.”

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He argued that Iraqi oil profits allowed Islamic State to sustain itself, although the terror group also took root in Syria. “If that oil wasn’t there we wouldn’t have the Islamic State, so when he says things like [Barack] Obama and Hillary [Clinton] were the founders of Islamic State, he doesn’t mean literally,” he said.

Last month, when a conservative radio host similarly said Trump meant the “founder” remark figuratively – that the Obama administration’s policies had created a vacuum in which Isis grew – Trump replied: “No, I meant that he’s the founder of Isis, I do.”

He later said the comment was “sarcastic, but not that sarcastic”.

Giuliani admitted that he would not have foreseen the rise of Islamic State before the withdrawal of most US forces from Iraq, under a timeline set by George W Bush and followed by Barack Obama, following difficult negotiations with Baghdad.

“If we’re going to have lost that many people in Iraq, we should have something to say about how that oil is distributed,” Giuliani said. “That would have been the reason I would’ve done it.”