Transcript via CBS

DICKERSON: Let me ask you about Libya. You have been highly critical of Libya and Hillary Clinton. You were also for military action to oust Gadhafi and military action to take care of humanitarian situation in Libya. You supported that.

TRUMP: When you say supported it, I supported Libya?

DICKERSON: Yes, you supported intervention in Libya.

TRUMP: I did? Where do you see that?

DICKERSON: In a video blog from 2011, you said:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Now, we should go in. We should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick. We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it and save these lives.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: That`s a big difference from what we`re talking about.

DICKERSON: But you were for intervention.

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: Again, I`m only one. I made lot of money with Gadhafi. If you remember, he came to country and he had to make a deal with me because he needed a place to stay, and he paid me a fortune, never got to stay there. And it became sort of a big joke.

But fact is that Libya was a disaster from standpoint of way it was handled.

DICKERSON: But you were for intervention, just to clear that up?

TRUMP: I was for doing something, but I wasn`t for what you have right now.

And right now, ISIS has their oil, John. ISIS is selling — that is among finest oil in world. ISIS has taken over Libyan oil. And we don`t do blockades. We don`t do anything. They`re selling it. They`re making a fortune with it.

So, we go out, we do Libya, we do it poorly, as poorly as you can do it. You can`t do worse. And then now, if you look at what`s happened, end result is, ISIS selling oil and it`s a total mess.

DICKERSON: This is one of things that confuses some people about your positions. You said you weren`t for intervention, but you were for intervention in Libya.

TRUMP: I didn`t mind surgical. And I said surgical. You do a surgical shot and you take them out.

But I wasn`t for what happened. Look at way it`s — look at — with Benghazi and with all of problems that you have had. It was handled horribly.

(CROSSTALK)

DICKERSON: But you said you were never for intervention.

TRUMP: I was never for a strong intervention. I could have seen surgical, where you take out Gadhafi and his group.

On part of this Trump is correct. Libya is a mess. The US led intervention there was, and I say this with all seriousness, nothing more or less an effort by a bunch of pencil necks in Obama’s National Security Council, Defense Department, and State Department to prove that not only could they overthrow a dictator like the Evil Bush, but they could do it cheaply and bloodlessly… or rather with the contribution of blood being by non-voters in presidential elections in the US. It was totally unmoored from any US strategic objective in the region.

On the other hand, the intervention was as close to “surgical” as you can get while dropping 2,000-lb JDAMs things. But let’s assume that Trump is talking about one-dictator-one-bomb, how does the outcome of that scenario differ from the outcome of the Obama-Clinton Kmart war? It doesn’t. Qaddafi is dead. His government is gone. The only viable and organized opposition, as is the case in virtually any totalitarian regime, were groups who were just as ruthless as Qaddafi, himself. In short, no matter the means of Qaddafi’s eventual death, the outcome we see today was preordained absent the infusion of tens of thousands of combat troops and constabulary forces to maintain law and order for a period of years.

And, for the record, ISIS is NOT selling Libyan oil. ISIS is engaged in attacking Libyan oil production. ISIS controlled areas are under a UN trade embargo. In Syria, ISIS sells oil to the Assad regime. One wonders where they would sell oil originating in Libya.

But Dickerson let Trump off easy. In August 2011, Trump was advocating us entering into an alliance with “Libyan rebels”, aka al Qaeda, to overthrow Qaddafi in exchange for a share of oil production.

and as recently as February 25, in one of the innumerable GOP debates, Trump praised both Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein and said things would be better if they were still in charge

What is scary in all of this is not only the fact that Trump is simply so disinterested about world affairs that he hasn’t bothered to try to understand squat even as his nomination has become more and more inevitable. He simply does not care. He occupies a universe where reality is what he says it is and things happen because he wishes it so. That, unfortunately, seems to be exactly the same world occupied by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And the means we are well and truly f***ed no matter what happens in November.