How crazy is Donald Trump, or more appropriately, how far outside of the mainstream of US politics is he?

This week over at The Intercept, Robert Mackey posted a piece about Trump's policy proposal to use the US military as the muscle to seize the oil resources of Middle Eastern countries.

His article recounts the many occasions that Trump has touted this policy in interviews and suggests that we can "better understand what Trump really is," by viewing him through this lens.

To give you a flavor of the commentary that Mackey is referring to, here is a condensed version of some of Trump's word salad that Mackey quotes from an appearance on the Bill O'Reilly show (emphasis mine):

"In the old days, when you had wars, you win, right? You win. To the victor belong the spoils. So when we go to Iraq, we spend $1.4 trillion so far and thousands of lives are lost, right? And not to mention all the poor guys and gals with one arm and no arm and all the problems, right? ... I like the old system better: You won a war, you stay there, and you keep the oil. And you know, then those people will not have died in vain. Forget the money we spent, they will not have died in vain. ... You stay and protect the oil, and you take the oil and you take whatever is necessary for them and you take what’s necessary for us and we pay our self back $1.5 trillion or more. We take care of Britain, we take care of other countries that helped us, and we don’t be so stupid."

Mackey goes to some effort to demonstrate that Trump is a lunatic version of Smedley Butler's nightmare.

Mackey, like many commentators are hot to call Trump a lunatic, but they always seem to avoid the elephant in the room:

Ahead of and shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a number of officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz suggested the war could be done on the cheap and that it would largely pay for itself. In October 2003, Rumsfeld told a press conference about President Bush's request for $21 billion for Iraq and Afghan reconstruction that "the $20 billion the president requested is not intended to cover all of Iraq's needs. The bulk of the funds for Iraq's reconstruction will come from Iraqis -- from oil revenues, recovered assets, international trade, direct foreign investment, as well as some contributions we've already received and hope to receive from the international community." In March 2003, Mr. Wolfowitz told Congress that "we're really dealing with a country that could finance its own reconstruction." In April 2003, the Pentagon said the war would cost about $2 billion a month, and in July of that year Rumsfeld increased that estimate to $4 billion.

Remember that? It wasn't so long ago - and we were all shouting "no war for oil" at any politician that would listen at the time.

The fact is, that this is a recurrent theme for the better part of a century of US history.

Before the 1%-driven US government was justifying its grabs of Middle Eastern oil with obfuscatory cover about "fighting terrorism," it justified it by propagandizing that they were "fighting communism," as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. points out:

During the 1950s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers — CIA Director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles — rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a neutral zone in the Cold War and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab nationalism — which Allen Dulles equated with communism — particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies that they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA’s director of plans, Frank Wisner, and John Foster Dulles, in September 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” according to a memo recorded by his staff secretary, Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster.

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949 — barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Quwatli, hesitated to approve the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation for Al-Quwatli’s lack of enthusiasm for the U.S. pipeline, the CIA engineered a coup replacing al-Quwatli with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im.

Then of course there was the 1953 Iranian coup that the CIA engineered. They deposed the democratically-elected president for having the nerve to attempt to renegotiate some oil contracts which strongly favored the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP).

Naturally, there was a little blowback once the brutal dictator the CIA imposed on Iran was deposed.

Apparently, the blowback hasn't much bothered the 1% to date, since they maintain the same game plan, recently carried out by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

The war in Syria did not begin when the government of Bashar al Assad cracked down on protestors in the spring of 2011. That version of events is obfuscating hogwash.  The war began in 2009, when Assad rejected a Qatari plan to transport gas from Qatar to the EU via Syria. As Robert F Kennedy Jr. explains in his excellent article “Syria: Another pipeline War”:

“The $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey….would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey… The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would have given the Sunni Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world. ….

In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally….

Assad further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence in the Mid-East and the world…”

Naturally, the Saudis, Qataris, Turks and Americans were furious at Assad, but what could they do? How could they prevent him from choosing his own business partners and using his own sovereign territory to transport gas to market?

What they could do is what any good Mafia Don would do; break a few legs and steal whatever he wanted.

What it comes down to after considering the history of US policy towards oil-resourced nations in the Middle East is that Donald Trump is solidly in the mainstream of US policy.

There is not a dime's worth of difference between Donald Trump's proposed policy and Hillary Clinton's policy actions during her career in office.

The perceived difference is Trump's naked embrace of the truth without the bodyguard of euphemisms and propaganda-speak that other candidates sugar-coat US policy with.

The problem that so many journalists and commentators avoid mention of is that US policy is barbaric and stupid - and both Trump and Clinton fully embrace it as Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, etc. did before them.

In content and style, both Trump and Clinton are running for George W. Bush's fifth term.

So blinkered voters, tied to the bipartisan duopoly can now choose between an unvarnished barbarian and a barbarian ("We came, we saw, he died") who is more polished in the art of propaganda.

If Hillary wins, surely all of our missions in the Middle East will be the humanitarian attempts of an exceptional, indispensable nation to protect the weak and spread the blessings of democracy abroad.

Imagine what Albert Schweitzer could have done for mankind if only he had access to drones and Hellfire missiles.