Trump: ‘The Middle East Is a Mess Because of Iraq’

TRUMP: "This all started because Jeb made a statement that under my brother we were safe. Well, if you would qualify that by saying after the attack-- but he didn't do that. So, I said the other day when somebody brought up that statement what I said at the interview that how can you say that we were safe under his brother when we just had the worst attack in the history of our country. You can't say we were safe. You can say, yes, we did well after, but then we also made mistakes there because, yes, we were safe in the sense, but we went into the Iraq, which was the disastrous decision. Just a disastrous decision. Not Afghanistan because that's probably where we should have gone in the first place. But Iraq was a disastrous decision. If you look at what happened. Number one, I would have had much stronger immigration policies. I'm not saying I would have prevented it, but I would have had a chance because I'm pretty good at this stuff. But I would have had much stronger immigration policies in effect."

CAMEROTA: "Hold on. Yes, but meaning that you --if you were president you wouldn't allow student visas? I mean as you know the hijackers came on tourists visas and student visas--"

TRUMP: "I would have had a much tougher visa programs, because visas are too easy. I'd have much tougher --"

CAMEROTA: "You wouldn't allow those going forward.

TRUMP: "But Alisyn, they knew an attack was coming. George Tenant, the CIA director, knew in advance there would be an attack. And he said to the president and he said so to everybody else that would listen and that came out. The other thing is is the FBI, the NSC and the CIA were not talking to each other. These are the three main agencies. They weren't talking to each other. And they weren't talking because they didn't like each other and they had a lot of problems getting along and that's leadership. You have to get your three main agencies to talk to each other. They had a lot of information that if could have been correlated it would have been very helpful."

CAMEROTA: “Yes.”

TRUMP: “As President Truman said, the buck stops here. Whether you like it or. Truman would have said -- he wouldn't be talking about it after attack. He would have said the buck stops here. But you had the FBI, NSC and CIA, all three, they weren't talking to each other. Now, you know, say what you want but then we went out and we attacked the wrong country. Because we went out and attacked Iraq. They had no weapons of mass destruction as you know as we found out, and as we found out it [indecipherable]. So they had no -- we destabilized the entire Middle East. I mean, this is wrong. The Middle East is a mess right now because of Iraq, because we totally destabilized [it]. And two powers, Iraq and Iran, capitated and Iran now is taking over the Middle East; taking over Iraq, taking over the oil."