[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 5 (Thursday, January 9, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S113-S114]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                  Iran

  Mr. President, I also want to say a few things about the situation in 
Iran and about some of the comments that we have heard here on the 
floor today.
  First of all, I think it is important to set the record straight when 
it comes to the Iran deal. We hear people say: Well, we never should 
have walked away from it. Let me tell you something. We should never 
have been in it in the first place. We should never have been in this. 
How in heaven's name could anybody have thought it was a good idea to 
put $1.7 billion of cash on a pallet, stick it on a plane, and fly it 
to Iran? Whoever would have thought that?
  The Iran nuclear deal was not something that helped to stabilize an 
issue; it incentivized Iran to do bad things. See, the Iran deal 
included a lifting of sanctions on Qasem Soleimani. Where was the first 
place he went? Where was the first place he went to get somebody to 
help to fund the Quds Force--to help fund all of this terrorism? He 
went to Russia--to his friends. This is why the Iran deal was not a 
good thing.
  Now, you can say they had to open their nuclear facilities to the 
IAEA, but there was a little caveat in there that doesn't get talked 
about a lot. They opened it with notification. Well, if you are going 
to get prior notification that somebody is going to look at your 
company, to look at your operation, to look at your house, to look at 
your country, what are you going to do? You are going to clean it up, 
and you are going to hide things. That is the Iran deal. They didn't 
stop enriching uranium. What they did was enrich it right up to the 
point at which it was just under the mark. Did they give it up? No, 
they didn't give it up.
  My colleague had mentioned the Reagan term of ``trust but verify.'' 
Thank goodness we have a President who decided he would verify, and 
thank goodness we have an intel community and a U.S. military that did 
the heavy lifting of figuring out what needed to be done.
  When you hear one of my colleagues ask, ``How do we put this back 
together or can we ever put it back together?'' we have started putting 
it back together. We have done it by saying: All right, folks, here is 
our redline. Guess what. This redline means something. This redline is 
drawn with the blood of hundreds of Americans who have been killed by 
this murderous villain. It is a redline of justice.
  So let's not have happy talk when it comes to this situation with 
Iran. Let's make certain we understand what has transpired. We know 
that our military and our intel communities watched for 8 months as 
there was escalating violence. We know that violence was orchestrated 
by none other than

[[Page S114]]

Soleimani himself. Intelligence provided to senior administration 
officials prior to the strike confirmed that Soleimani had posed a 
defined threat to the United States.
  When we speak about Iran in the context of conflict versus 
deterrence, we are not referring to a government or a military 
organization. It is important to note and for the American people to 
know that Iran is the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism. Do 
you know who it points that terrorism to? Isn't it interesting. Iran 
tends to have little bywords. It says: This is our goal--to destroy 
America, to destroy Israel. That is what Iran has been up to. It has 
nurtured a proxy network that has helped it to claw its way into the 
heads of regional leaders who are either too weak or who are wholly 
unwilling to resist those overtures.
  Relationships with Russia and with Bashar al-Assad in Syria have kept 
Iranian leaders a part of mainstream conversations about national 
security.
  Hezbollah in Lebanon is a close friend of Iran, and their support of 
militias and Houthi rebels in Yemen adds to the aura of chaos around 
Iran's activities.
  So what does all of this have to do with a targeted strike on one 
man? That one man has spent a lifetime doing exactly what he was doing 
the day he died--using violence and intimidation to bring Shiite 
ideology into prominence and, to quote the notorious Ayatollah 
Khamenei, ``end the corrupting presence of America in the Middle 
East.''
  That is what they thought. Those are their comments, their words--not 
mine, not the President's, not the military's, not the intel's--the 
Ayatollah's. That is what he said.
  Soleimani took to the frontlines with the Revolutionary Guard in 
1979. That may trigger some thoughts of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, 
and American diplomats and citizens that were held hostage.
  Soleimani was not a new arrival to the terrorist community. Sometime 
between 1997 and 1998 he was named commander of the Quds Force. Under 
his leadership, the Revolutionary Guard has gained control of over 20 
percent of Iran's economy, and the Quds Force has extended its 
influence to all Gulf States, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and 
Central Asia.
  He controlled Iran's intervention in support of Assad in Syria and 
was the primary architect of Hezbollah in Lebanon. They have built up 
and trained scores of Hezbollah and Houthi fighters, as well as Shiite 
militias in Syria and Iraq, and those Iraqi militias killed more than 
600 U.S. troops during the Iraq War.
  Soleimani made much of his militaristic role, but he was a general in 
name only. He hid behind a uniform while designing, devising, 
conducting, and advising terror plots, and that is what earned him a 
spot on the list of people sanctioned by the EU, the United States, and 
the U.N. He wasn't a bureaucrat. He was not one of many respected 
generals.
  The Ayatollah called him a living martyr in his lifetime, but I 
intend to call him exactly what he was--a ruthless terrorist and a 
shameless, even proud, engineer of hatred, death, and destruction. That 
is his legacy.
  His tendency toward violence as a default was thrown into full relief 
when President Trump withdrew from that Iranian nuclear deal, just as I 
said a moment ago.
  In early May of last year, the intel indicated an increased threat 
from Tehran, and between May and September, Iran and its proxies 
perpetrated more than 80 violent attacks in the region--80--on us and 
our allies, 80 attacks. They attacked multiple tankers and commercial 
vessels. They downed an American drone. They took out 5 percent of the 
world's oil supply. Now we find out that they have taken out a 
jetliner.
  They used their own drones to attack a Saudi airport. A suicide 
bomber murdered four Afghans and wounded four U.S. troops traveling in 
a convoy in eastern Kabul.
  Soleimani was very confident, but perhaps he should have thought a 
little harder about the increased level of vulnerability he had built 
into his expanding network, because he didn't die in a hidden bunker or 
behind the walls of a fortified compound. He died in public while 
traversing the Middle East, defining impunity and even taking selfies 
with proxy terrorists. He did every bit of this in violation of U.N. 
resolutions. He died because his aggression morphed into a pattern of 
arrogance and violent escalation that U.S. officials could not, in good 
conscience, continue to allow.
  This month Iranian officials lost their chief terrorist, but they 
have gained an opportunity, and, I will tell you, the ball is in their 
court.
  Their retaliatory strikes against our shared bases in Iraq did 
nothing to repair their image as a belligerent and deeply vulnerable 
regime. If their lack of precision was calculated, no one got the 
intended message.
  The Iranians are now left with two choices, and they are theirs. Pick 
one. We hope they choose well.
  Option No. 1, they can come to the table and behave like a normal 
country. They are a country rich in resources and smart, educated 
people. Come to the table and behave like a normal country in the 
community of nations and allow deterrence to make a comeback.
  Option No. 2, they can risk being reminded that the United States 
will defend to the death the redline that separates justice from chaos, 
and the American people are going to make certain that we continue to 
go after monsters who crusade as the declared enemies of freedom.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.