US lawmakers see no Trump plan for Iran following strikes
Trump’s publicly announced strategy so far is largely based on the hope that the Iranian people will rise up and determine their own future after decades of oppression.
While Republicans expressed optimism about the attacks, Democrats were skeptical that the attacks would lead to a positive outcome, but lawmakers on both sides were uncertain about the immediate future. Trump told the Daily Mail later Sunday that the military operation could continue for four weeks.
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WHAT COMES NEXT?
All of the lawmakers who appeared on the Sunday morning talk show opposed the deployment of U.S. ground forces to Iran.
“There’s no simple answer to what’s going to happen next,” Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a staunch Trump ally and defense hawk, echoed the US president’s call for the Iranian people to decide who runs their government.
“You know, I don’t believe one bit in the idea of ’If you break it, you own it,'” Graham said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “This is not Iraq. This is not Germany. This is not Japan. We will save the people from the terrorist regime.” Khamenei’s death began a process in which a three-person council would govern the country until a separate religious body elects a new religious leader.
Asked if the United States had identified a leader of the Iranian opposition behind whom the Iranian people could rally, Cotton said: “The opposition is the 90 million Iranians who have suffered under the brutal Islamic Republic Revolutionary regime for the last 47 years.”
Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said he cannot see how regime change in Iran could occur with the current operation.
“There’s no instance in modern history that I know of where regime change has occurred solely through airstrikes,” Coons said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Before Saturday’s airstrikes, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency assessed that hardline figures in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps could replace Khamenei if he were killed, two sources with knowledge of the intelligence said.
Trump said on Sunday that 48 leading figures in the Iranian government have been killed so far. Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, noted the earlier CIA assessment.
“So we’re not going to get democracy. We’re going to have even worse Iranian leadership,” Murphy told the CBS program. “It’s no secret that this administration has no plan for the chaos now unfolding in the Middle East.”
‘ELECTION WAR’
Attacks by the United States and Israel, as well as retaliation by Iran, have sent shockwaves through many industries including shipping, air travel and oil, amid warnings of rising energy costs and disruption of business in the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway.
Three U.S. soldiers were killed and five others were seriously wounded, the U.S. military said Sunday, in the first U.S. casualties in operations against Iran. Trump partially justified the attack by pointing to the threat of the Iranian nuclear program, which he claimed had until recently been “destroyed” by the United States. Air strikes were carried out last June.
While Trump’s fellow Republicans largely stood behind the president, many Democratic lawmakers said the attack was illegal because only Congress has the right to declare war under the Constitution.
Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee from Virginia who was among eight lawmakers briefed last week before the strikes, said the administration had not presented evidence of an imminent threat. Instead, Warner said, “Trump has started a “war of choice.”
“I’ve seen no intelligence that Iran is on the verge of launching any kind of preemptive strike against the United States,” Warner said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Warner and U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, expressed concern that this could drag the United States into another long and complex conflict in the Middle East.
Khanna, who led the initiative in the House of Representatives to prevent further military intervention without congressional approval, said it was unclear how Iran would be governed after Khamenei’s death.
“Khamenei was a brutal dictator, but Americans are no safer today,” Khanna said. “The question is: ‘Will the country be dragged into civil war? Will our billions of dollars be spent there? Will American soldiers be at risk?'”
Lawmakers said they want to avoid a protracted and costly conflict reminiscent of the Iraq War, which lasted for years and cost thousands of American lives. Sen. Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, said he hoped U.S. involvement in Iran would be completed within a month.
“It all depends on who the new leader in Iran is,” Scott said on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures” show. “We will finish this, if we don’t finish it we will have done it in 5 years, 10 years.”
