Former New York mayor and Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani overlooked the existence of international humanitarian law Sunday, saying that “anything’s legal” between actors during wartime.
“Of course it’s legal,” Giuliani said, referring to Donald Trump’s proposal that the U.S. should have taken Iraq’s oil. “It’s a war. Until the war is over, anything’s legal.”
He said that Trump had proposed distributing the oil, perhaps inside of Iraq, so that the Islamic State would not have access to it.
“He didn’t say we should take it for ourselves necessarily, he said we should secure so it doesn’t get taken by terrorist forces,” Giuliani said. “If that oil wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have the Islamic State.”
Giuliani, in defending Trump’s statement, did not take into account international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions, a set of international agreements that govern war.
According to experts, Trump’s proposal would violate the fourth Geneva Convention, as well as other laws that prohibit pillaging.
