Sen. Rand Paul rebuked President Trump’s decision to kill top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and said the world was safer under the previous administration’s controversial deal with Iran.
The Kentucky Republican, who recently argued that Soleimani’s death means the end of diplomacy with Iran, condemned the president’s attack during a Tuesday morning appearance on Fox News’s America’s Newsroom.
Paul, 57, noted that the Iran nuclear agreement brokered by former President Barack Obama in 2015 “wasn’t perfect” and that he “was a critic of” it but added that “it was a big mistake to pull out of the agreement” as opposed to building upon it.
“We did that, but then we placed an embargo where Iran wasn’t allowed to sell any goods internationally, including their main export of oil,” the senator added. “Enacting an embargo is like an act of war. And then, to top that off, we’ve now killed one of their major generals. I think it is the death of diplomacy, and I see no way to get it back started again until sort of the revenge of the Iranian people is somehow sated. And I hate this; I hate that this is where we are going.”
Paul then commented that “there was much less killing, much less violence after the Iran agreement.” Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement in 2018.
Soleimani, 62, was killed Thursday in an airstrike near Baghdad International Airport. The Pentagon described the attack as a “decisive defensive action” in response to him “actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.”
Iran has vowed “forceful revenge” for Soleimani’s killing, and the U.S. has deployed approximately 3,000 more troops to the Middle East as the situation plays out.
