Republican Donald Trump stretched the truth during his Youngstown speech

Staff/wire report

YOUNGSTOWN

How truthful was Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump during his foreign-policy speech at Youngstown State University?

Monday’s speech by Trump was about terrorism, and if elected, he said he would stop it, with a particular focus on destroying ISIS, also known as Islamic State, a terrorist organization based in the Middle East.

However, during the speech, Trump made some false claims.

Trump blamed the “rise of ISIS” directly on President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, his Democratic presidential opponent.

“The Obama-Clinton foreign policy has unleashed ISIS, destabilized the Middle East, and put the nation of Iran, which chants ‘Death to America,’ in a dominant position of regional power and, in fact, aspiring to be a dominant world power.”

He repeated – almost word for word – a portion of his Republican National Convention acceptance speech. He said before Obama and Clinton, who was Obama’s first secretary of state, were in power, Libya was stable, Syria was under control, Egypt was an American ally, Iraq was seeing a reduction in violence, Iran was being choked by economic sanctions, and ISIS was close to being extinguished.

ISIS, however, can be traced back to 2004 during the presidential administration of Republican George W. Bush, according to Politifact, a Pulitizer-Prize-winning organization operated by the Tampa Bay Times.

Also, fact checkers with the Associated Press wrote: “Trump seems to be confusing Obama and Clinton’s limited interventions, and sometimes non-interventions, with President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 regime-change efforts.”

AP wrote that Obama kept his vow not to deploy troops to Libya and never promised a stable democracy there. Also, Obama did very little to get involved in Syria.

Trump also revisited his claim Monday that he “was an opponent of the Iraq war from the beginning – a major difference between me and my opponent. Though I was a private citizen, whose personal opinion on such matters was not sought, I nonetheless publicly expressed my private doubts about the invasion.”

Politifact wrote on June 22 that Trump’s claim he opposed the Iraq War since its start is false. In a September 2002 interview with Howard Stern, Trump said, “Yeah, I guess so,” when asked if he was supporting the looming invasion.

He also said Monday that he opposed nation building, but said, “We should have kept the oil in Iraq” because “in the old days, when we won a war, to the victor belonged the spoils.”

Associated Press fact checkers wrote that Trump is suggesting the U.S. should have seized oil from Iraq, a sovereign nation, and that after major wars, this country tends to give money and aid to countries it has defeated and help re-establish governments such as it did in Japan and Germany after World War II.

Trump claimed Monday – he’s also done it before – that one of the San Bernardino shooters’ neighbors “saw suspicious behavior, bombs on the floor and other things, but didn’t warn authorities because they said they didn’t want to be accused of racial profiling.”

There is no evidence that ever happened, AP reported, pointing out that the San Bernardino police chief said no one reported knowing anything about the married couple who killed 14 people in a Dec. 2, 2015, terrorist attack.

Trump said Monday: “I had previously said that NATO was obsolete because it failed to deal adequately with terrorism. Since my comments, they have changed their policy and now have a new division focused on terror threats.”

NATO, however, established the Defense Against Terrorism program in 2004.