FACT CHECK: Trump gets his Mideast history wrong

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump on Monday painted the Middle East as an oasis of stability before Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, arguing that she and President Barack Obama "launched" the Islamic State group onto the world.

[...] he advocated his own vision for U.S. foreign policy that included the suggestion of a U.S. takeover of Iraq's oil reserves.

TRUMP: "President Obama and Hillary Clinton should have never attempted to build a democracy in Libya, to push for immediate regime change in Syria or to support the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt."

Obama vowed not to deploy U.S. troops on the ground and focused primarily on protecting Libyan civilians from dictator Moammar Gadhafi's military forces.

To this day, the United States maintains its call for a Syria without Assad, even as it works with the Syrian leader's closest partners to try to engineer a unity government that would keep Assad in power, perhaps indefinitely.

The U.S.-led military campaign in Libya created a security vacuum and political chaos.

Some experts say the instability in Libya opened a door for the Islamic State to spread to North Africa, particularly after it suffered heavy losses in Syria and Iraq in 2015-16.

[...] the mission would require a permanent occupation, or at least until the oil runs out, and a large presence of American soldiers to guard sometimes isolated oil fields and infrastructure.

To achieve Trump's stated goal of destroying Islamic State militants' revenue stream, the U.S. has bombed oil facilities in Iraq.

Doing so, he says, would unnecessarily anger Arab allies fighting the group, alienate Muslims at home and validate the claims of the enemy.

A neighbor 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.

Jarrod Burguan, the city's police chief, says no one reported knowing anything about what husband-and-wife shooters Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik had been plotting, even after the Dec. 2, 2015, terror attack that killed 14 people at a luncheon for county government employees.

TRUMP: 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.