Trump allies defend US-Israel strikes on Iran as Democrats call it a ‘war of choice’

Donald Trump administration allies reinforced on Sunday the administration’s messaging on the Israel-US strikes on Iran, while Democratsdecried it as a “war of choice” that required congressional approval.

On Sunday talk shows, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, who serves on the Armed Services Committee, and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham defended the strikes, while Virginia senator Mark Warner, vice-chairman of the Committee on Intelligence, and other Democrats welcomed the elimination of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but said the administration must now answer vital questions.

“I’m not going to shed any tears over the death of the Iranian leadership,” Warner told CNN’s State of the Union. “The question is why now? Why not make the case to the American public?”

Warner said Trump had started “a war of choice”.

“There was no imminent threat to the United States,” he said. “It’s incumbent that the president comes before the American people and Congress to make the case on why he’s chosen to go to war.”

Warner has warned that the strikes risk pulling the US into another broad conflict in the Middle East. On Sunday, he went further, pointing to a lack of US intelligence visibility into the Iranian resistance to its theocratic leadership or who may replace Khamenei.

“Will the president’s supporters still say this is a great move if the person who replaces the supreme leader is even further to the right and actually rushes forward on their nuclear program,” Warner said, pointing out that Khamenei maintained Iran’s nuclear enrichment program but did not approve moving to full weaponization.

“We have very little visibility into what happens next,” Warner said. A populist revolution and a reduction in regional violence “would be a wonderful outcome,” he added, but “I don’t believe that will happen”. A deeply-embedded Iranian leadership, he predicted, “will fight vociferously to try to maintain their power.”

Administration allies took a different position, saying that there was no doubt that Iran was going to continue to target US bases and allies in the region.

“That’s why it was so vitally necessary to put an end to Iran’s 47-year campaign of terror and revolutionary violence once and for all,” Cotton, told CNN. He add that Iran had crossed the red lines of the civilized world going back to the 1979 hostage crisis.

Trump, he said, “has finally put his foot down and made it clear that we will no longer tolerate the revolutionary violence of the Islamic republic of Iran.”

Asked if the decapitation of the Iranian leadership would achieve regime change, Cotton said the immediate threat was Iran’s military capabilities. “We’ve always said Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. They also can’t be allowed to have a vast missile arsenal and that’s what they have”.

Cotton repeated the strategic maxim that administration officials have used in recent days.

“They have thousands and thousands of missiles, much more than what the United States and Israel have in missile defense combined.” Cotton said.

“It’s much easier to kill the archer on the ground than it is to shoot his arrow out of the sky,” he added. “What you will see in the days ahead will be a methodical and systematic focus on Iran’s missiles, it’s missile launchers, and ultimately its missile manufacturing capability.”

Speaking to NBC’s Face the Nation, Cotton added that the administration does not see US ground troops in Iran unless they are part of a search-and-rescue for a downed pilot. “The president has no plan for any kind of large scale ground force inside of Iran,” he said.

He predicted that if Democrats force a vote on the strikes through the War Powers act, there will be “overwhelming Republican support for our troops and for the president’s decision to finally eliminate the threat of Iran”.

He added: “I would invite Democrats in the Congress to join their Democratic colleagues like John Fetterman and Josh Gottheimer and Greg Landsman in supporting our troops, in finally putting America’s foot down against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

In a separate interview, Graham disputed the characterization of a war.

The California congressman Ro Khanna rejected Graham’s position that the world is safer without the supreme leader, telling NBC’s Meet the Press the senator is “the face of Republican foreign policy”.

“He’s been consistent, but he’s been consistently wrong,” Khanna said. “Let me say this: Khamenei was a brutal dictator, but Americans are not safer today. Senator Graham cheered us into the Iraq war. He cheered us into the effort with Libya. And Trump ran against him in 2016.”

“He said regime change wars are absolute failures. And that has escaped Donald Trump,” Khanna continued. “The question is: is the country going to descend in civil war? Are billions of our dollars going to be spent there? Are American troops going to be at risk?”