[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.

[[Page S38]]

  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.