Senator Cotton Demands a Military Attack on Iran

June 17, 2019 (EIRNS)—Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who has a long record of aggressive rhetoric against Iran, demanded that the Trump Administration launch military attacks in retaliation for Iran’s alleged complicity in the June 13 Gulf of Oman tanker attacks. Cotton said on “Face the Nation” Sunday TV broadcast that Trump has broad authority to sign off on military operations that “defend American interests.” “The fastest way to get the fire and fury of the U.S. military unleashed on you is to interfere with the freedom of navigation on the open seas and in the air. That’s exactly what Iran is doing in one of the world’s most important strategic choke points,” he said.

Cotton further showed his ignorance when he claimed that John Bolton’s lying about Iraq in 2003 has nothing to do with Iran in 2019. He claimed that the two events are “very different things,” in that Saddam Hussein was hiding something that states work the hardest to keep secret, while everybody knows what Iran is doing. “There’s really not much to assess right here. Everybody can see with their own two eyes, those Iranian sailors going up to a ship and taking a mine off of it,” he said referring to the grainy video that the Pentagon released following the attacks. Cotton promised that a campaign against Iran would be quick and easy. “What I’m talking about is not like what we’ve seen in Iraq for the last 16 years or Afghanistan for the last 18 years,” he lied.

Daniel Larison, writing in the American Conservative, recalls that the neoconservatives made the same promises before launching those earlier wars. “Cotton cannot promise that attacking Iran wouldn’t turn into another prolonged, bloody conflict that could potentially drag on for years, and hawks have pulled a fast one on the public too many times for us to believe anything they have to say about another unnecessary war now,” he writes.