[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 3 (Tuesday, January 7, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S37-S39]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Iran
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, at a time of international turmoil and
crisis like this, all of us, I think, are sometimes prone to hyperbole.
I count myself as part of that club. I endeavor to do better.
It doesn't serve this body well to warn of bad decisions that could
lead to war if we are only doing it to serve political ends or to
bloody up a political opponent. Crying wolf also anesthetizes the
public and risks dulling the country's senses at a moment when the
peril is real. Anytime we are considering asking the men and women of
our Armed Forces and their families to make further sacrifices for
their country, we have to treat those moments with the gravity they
deserve.
Let me state at the outset of my remarks that there are important
reasons why I believe that both Iran and the United States do not want
to enter into a conventional conflict that would likely involve the
United States taking steps to remove the Supreme Leader from power and
which would likely involve an invasion that would make Iraq in 2003
look like child's play.
The United States, of course, remembers the Iraq war--at least, I
think we do. Our military leaders know that a short-term fight in Iran
would be much bloodier and would be much more costly than the initial
invasion of Iraq. Iran, for instance, has twice the population of Iraq.
A long-term counterinsurgency in Iran would be endless, potentially
costing hundreds of thousands of lives.
The Iranian leadership also knows that the United States might never
defensively defeat a drawn-out insurgency on Iranian turf, but Iran's
leaders also know they likely wouldn't be around to see that eventual
conclusion because the United States would, at the very least, likely
be successful in ending the existing regime.
So neither side is likely war-gaming for victory. Even those of us
who are deeply critical of President Trump's Iran policy should
acknowledge this, but as a student of history, I know that the annals
of war are replete with cataclysmic conflicts that began not by choice
but by accident, negligence, and incompetence.
So today, when I warn of the United States being on a potential path
to war with Iran, that is my concern, that the utter lack of strategy,
the complete absence of nuance, the abandoned communication and
coordination with our allies, and the alarming deficiency of
experienced counsel will end up getting thousands of Americans
needlessly killed.
This is not the first warning of this kind I have presented. A year
and a half ago, the President ignored the advice of his first Secretary
of State and his first Secretary of Defense, and he unilaterally pulled
the United States out of the Iran nuclear agreement, despite the fact
that every expert agreed that Iran was in compliance. Then, to make
things worse, President Trump enacted a series of devastating
unilateral sanctions on Iran. No other nations joined with us. In fact,
most of our allies actively and aggressively worked against us, trying
to undermine and work around those sanctions in order to save the
nuclear agreement. That fact, in and of itself, is simply extraordinary
and a sign of how weak President Trump has made America abroad.
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The sanctions still took a dramatic toll on Iran's economy, and like
everybody predicted, the Iranian Government didn't sit still. They
began to push back, attacking Saudi oil pipelines, capturing European
oil tankers, and ratcheting up threats against U.S. forces in Iraq.
During this time, the President changed his story every week. Some days
he said he would sit down and negotiate with the Iranians without
preconditions. Other days his top people said they wouldn't sit down
unless Iran met an absurdly long list of preconditions. Other days,
President Trump said he wanted to blast Iran off the map. It was a
comedy of diplomatic errors, compounded nearly weekly with conflicting
message after conflicting message that made it difficult for Iran to
approach negotiations with us, even if they wanted to.
By this winter, the situation was spiraling out of control. Iranian-
backed militias launched a rocket attack that killed a U.S. private
contractor in Iraq. The United States responded by killing at least 24
Iraqi militia members. Then Iraqi militia, supported by Iran, stormed
our Embassy, culminating, for now, in the drone strike that killed
General Qasem Soleimani last week in Iraq. There is no reason things
had to get to this point. When President Trump came into office, Iran
had stopped their quest for nuclear weapons capabilities, and Iran was
complying with an intrusive inspections regime that made sure they
didn't cheat.
Iranian-backed militias had stopped firing rockets at U.S. personnel
in Iraq. In fact, they were actually working on a U.S.-led project in
Iraq--the eradication of ISIS.
President Obama had united the entire world against Iran. Even Russia
and China were working side by side with the United States to constrict
Iran's nuclear weapons program. And with the nuclear agreement secured,
this global coalition was teed up and ready to be mobilized by
President Trump to pressure Iran to make the next set of concessions on
their ballistic missile program and their support for terrorist proxies
across the region.
But Trump's bizarre and nonsensical Iran policy threw all that
leverage away willingly, voluntarily. Despite the economic sanctions,
Iran today is more powerful, is more menacing than ever before. Just
weeks ago, Iran had been wracked by anti-government protests, but
President Trump's recent actions have united the country against
America and against our allies in one fell swoop. One only needs to
look at yesterday, when millions of Iranians took to the streets for
Soleimani's funeral--a mass outpouring of support that the Iranian
regime could never have hoped to inspire on its own.
Compared to 3 years ago at the end of the Obama administration, today
Iran is closer to restoring its proxy state in Syria, Iran is more
influential in Yemen, Iran is more threatening to U.S. troops in Iraq
and across the Middle East, and Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon.
The simple truth is that Iran is stronger and we are less safe today
than when President Trump was inaugurated, but it gets, implausibly,
even worse.
Because the strike on Soleimani is so destabilizing and so
unstrategically provocative, the U.S. position in Iraq--where we are
still battling ISIS--is unraveling. All U.S. civilians have been
ordered to evacuate. All U.S. counter-ISIS operations have been
suspended. NATO has stopped its ongoing efforts to fight ISIS. The
Iraqi Parliament has begun the process of kicking out all U.S. forces
from the country--exactly what Qasem Soleimani had worked for years to
achieve.
All of that, on the back of Iran's newfound strength in the region,
is the reason there is so much head-shaking happening right now about
why President Trump has so willfully bungled Iran policy, emboldening
Iranian hard-liners and putting our Nation's safety at risk.
With that for context, we come back to the crisis moment of today and
the real possibility that more of President Trump's stumbling will lead
us into a world-changing conflict with Iran.
We, the Senators, have seen no evidence that the assassination of
Soleimani was necessary to prevent an imminent attack on the United
States. I remain open to seeing that intelligence, but 5 days later,
Congress has not received a briefing from the administration. We are
apparently going to get that tomorrow. But both President Obama and
President Bush had the ability to kill Soleimani. They didn't because
their experts believed that executing the second most powerful
political figure in Iran--no matter how evil he was, no matter how many
American deaths he was responsible for--would end up getting more, not
fewer, Americans killed.
We don't know in what form the reprisal from Iran will come or when,
but it will come. And, listen, we shouldn't be afraid of reprisals in
the wake of truly necessary military actions by the United States to
protect our interests abroad. But when that attack arrives, President
Trump has telegraphed that he is preparing to respond by committing war
crimes against the Iranian people. He says he will bomb cultural sites,
filled with civilian visitors, in retaliation. I can't believe this
needs to be said on the floor of the U.S. Senate, but that is something
terrorists do, not the United States.
Although this administration keeps saying they don't want war, there
is no logic to their circular theory of Iran policy. Trump believes
that to change Iran's behavior, we need to escalate our own actions.
Then when our escalation begets more escalation from Tehran, Trump and
his Iran hawks come to the conclusion that this must be due to the fact
that our escalation wasn't serious enough. The theory becomes
unprovable because the Iran hawks just contend, failure after failure,
that we just need one more escalation and one more escalation and one
more escalation. This is the exact behavior that could land us in a
kinetic conflict with Iran that costs American lives.
As I said at the outset, this is likely not going to be a full-on
conventional war--at least I hope it is not. It may be that Iran sends
missiles into Israel or ramps up the temperature in Yemen. They may try
to assassinate American military or political leaders or use cyber
warfare to go after critical infrastructure. And maybe we don't invade
Iran. Maybe we just blister their countryside with bombs or try to
disable their military from above.
Of course, no matter the scope of the conflict, no matter how long
this escalatory cycle lasts, the one thing we know is this: None of
this has anything to do with making us safer. This cycle started with
Trump's rejection of a diplomatic agreement with Iran that he didn't
like just because it had Barack Obama's name on it.
A political grudge set off a series of events that now has us lodged
in a crisis of harrowing scope, a crisis that this President--so
unstable, so reckless, so capricious--likely cannot handle.
Unfortunately, his rejection of diplomacy and lack of concern for our
allies has left America more isolated than at any other perilous time
in our history. At a moment when we cannot afford to be out on a limb,
out on our own, we are.
Politics is part of what got us here, but maybe politics is part of
how we get out of this mess. Congress can cut off funding for President
Trump's war of choice with Iran. We can make clear, Republicans and
Democrats, that the President cannot take military action without
congressional consent. And of course the American people can have their
say too. They can rise up, as they did in many cities this past
weekend, and cry out in protest over President Trump's decision to put
politics over our Nation's security. That public pressure may push
allies of the President's here in the Senate to stand with Democrats in
opposition to this reckless risk to our Nation's security. It is not
too late to put a stop to this madness.
Iran is an adversary. I don't want anything I have said today to
paper over all of that nation's misdeeds in the region. It is in our
national interest to conduct a foreign policy that weakens Iran's
ability to threaten us, our allies, and our interests. But for the last
3 years, President Trump has done exactly the opposite. Iran's nuclear
program is back on. Iran has restarted attacks against the United
States. Iran is more influential in the region. Everything the
President has done has worked to degrade our Nation's safety and has
worked to make Iran stronger.
The order to strike Soleimani has already been given, but what
happens
[[Page S39]]
next is not predetermined. My fear--my belief--is that last week's
killing of Qasem Soleimani will end up fitting into this pattern. But
we have serious choices to make in this body, and we can choose to get
off this path of escalation and make decisions that correct this
President's recklessness and keep America safe. I hope we step up to
that challenge.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds
Force, was killed by U.S. forces last week. That has already been well
discussed and well understood. The failing regime in Iran has done
everything it could, between his death and right now, to make the most
of it, to make him a martyr to the cause of terrorism.
I think we should all understand that the cause of terrorism was his
cause. He is not a general in any traditional sense of what that would
mean. He has been described a number of different ways. He has been
referred to as Iran's top general. Don't think for a minute that means
anything like almost any other country's top general.
One newspaper called him Iran's ``most revered military leader.''
That might be true, but remember Iran's purpose as a State is to
encourage terrorism all over the world.
I heard one news broadcast where he was referred to as ``an
irreplaceable figurehead,'' though they went on to explain that he was
a significant person. There apparently are no editors anymore because
the term ``figurehead'' doesn't mean what they were suggesting. If they
meant he was an irreplaceable figure, I hope that he is. I think he is
hard to replace, and I hope he is hard to replace. I would like to
think that in many ways he will not be able to be replaced, but that
doesn't mean he deserves our sympathy, respect, or our grief.
He was, in fact, a bad person. He spent his career largely outside
the boundaries of what any civilized nation would consider a military
context. He led Iran's terrorism agenda around the world.
Iran funded and provided weapons to the Shia militias in Iraq. They
provided arms depots and military forces to the Assad regime in Syria.
They supported Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. They provided advanced
weapons to the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Hundreds of U.S. military
personnel in Iraq were either killed or injured by the IED attacks
encouraged and funded by Iran in Iraq. That is what the Soleimani
agenda was all about.
Over this past year, Iran has continued its campaign of aggression
against the United States and our allies. In almost every report of
these activities, Soleimani was one of the persons mentioned as, again,
structuring, masterminding, encouraging, or taking credit for these
things as they happened in some cases and denying responsibility in
others for activities for which he and Iran were responsible.
Last June, Iran shot down a U.S. intelligence drone flying in
international space. In July, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
captured a British-flagged commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran was behind the attack on Saudi oilfields last September using
drones and cruise missiles. Iran was been behind an earlier attack on a
Saudi airport used by civilians. The Quds Force also launched a
crackdown on Iranian citizens who protested oil prices and are
vigorously seeking out others who are complaining about the failing
economy in Iran's failing system.
Someone has already been named to replace Soleimani as the head of
the Quds Force, but hopefully no one really can fully replace him.
I am not at all sympathetic to the idea that this action to eliminate
this individual somehow came out of the blue. I think the President has
been presented multiple times with this option as one of the things we
could do if we wanted to send the clearest possible message to Iran.
The President was criticized last year because when going down the list
of things I mentioned, he was hesitant to act--until last week. The
same exact critics in many cases decided, after a year of thinking what
would be the best response, that when the President did act it was
suddenly a hasty action. They went from calling his actions hesitant to
calling this hasty, looking for a way to criticize the President.
The President took this action after an American contractor was
killed by forces associated with Iran and Soleimani, after the U.S.
Embassy in Baghdad was attacked and weapons were used to get into the
building.
There have even been some suggestions that we shouldn't have done
this because we should be afraid of how Iran will react. We do have to
be thinking about how Iran would react. We need to be thinking about
what their next aggressive act might be. It would not be their first
aggressive act, and I have already gone down a pretty long list that
others can expand upon of the aggressive acts Iran has done up until
the last few days.
We do have to be thinking about what is an appropriate response, but
maybe it is now time for Iran to be thinking about what our next
response may be to their next aggression. The aggressive list is long,
the response that the U.S. Government took was significant, but we
can't fail to act decisively just because it might upset our terrorist
enemies. We can't fail to act decisively just because it might upset
the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism, Iraq.
Soleimani was not a high-ranking military official in any acceptable
military structure. If your idea of a leading general is a general who
leads in terrorist efforts, I think you have the wrong idea of what a
military leader is supposed to do.
Soleimani was not a high-ranking government official in any job that
a responsible government would have. Soleimani was the mastermind of
terrorist activities of the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism in the
world today. Soleimani has been eliminated and hopefully will be
impossible to fully replace.
I would say, in response to that decision, good job to the U.S.
forces that executed the strike, and good job, Mr. President, in being
willing to make the call. A bad person and a determined enemy of
freedom and democracy in the United States of America has been
eliminated. It is time for the Iranians to be thinking about what our
next action might be instead of quietly and vigorously planning on what
their next action might be.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.