One of the senators who oversees the intelligence community thinks President Trump is justified in his building up U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf.
“The intelligence that we’ve seen on the Senate Intelligence Committee does show a heightened threat throughout the region,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told CNN.
Cotton, one the most prominent Iran hawks in Congress, offered that support Wednesday, hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ordered a partial evacuation of two U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq. But the withdrawal of diplomatic staff triggered fuming by lawmakers who oversee the State Department about a lack of details from the administration.
“There are only two reasons for ordering their departure: We have credible intelligence that our people are at risk, or in preparation for military action in Iran,” New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said at the outset of a hearing that was supposed to focus on nuclear arms control negotiations. “And yet, the Trump administration has not provided any information to this committee on the intelligence behind their decisions or what they plan to do in Iraq or Iran.”
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, promptly echoed that call. “I agree with the ranking member about the need for a classified briefing about the matters in Iraq,” he said, referring to Menendez.
Trump’s team is expected to provide a classified briefing to the full Senate next week. And Pompeo has said that U.S. forces, including an aircraft carrier strike group deployed to the region in response to the reported threats, are designed to deter an attack rather than start a conflict.
“We fundamentally do not seek a war with Iran,” Pompeo said Tuesday while traveling in Russia. “[B]ut we’ve also made clear to the Iranians that if American interests are attacked, we will most certainly respond in an appropriate fashion.”
Still, Menendez likened the current tensions with Iran to the intelligence failures prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“We do not need another Iraq weapons of mass destruction moment, which led us to a disastrous military engagement when there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found,” he said during a speech on the Senate floor after the hearing. “We need clarity. We need answers. And we need them now.”
Cotton dismissed that analogy.
“There’s no doubt that intelligence assessments were incorrect in 2002 and 2003 and that the state of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program, that wasn’t only an American failure, that was a failure of the Intelligence Services of almost every one of our allies in Western Europe and in the region,” he told CNN International’s Christiane Amanpour. “If American troops or our embassy or allies were attacked with rockets or mortars in Iraq, again, that wouldn’t be an assessment or a guess, that would be a reality.”
