Hours after Iran fired over a dozen ballistic missiles at two military bases housing American forces in Iraq, Sen. Ted Cruz said the missiles used were paid by former President Barack Obama’s administration.
“Under Barack Obama, as you noted, the policy was appeasement … was to give over a hundred billion dollars to Iran,” the Texas Republican said on Fox News’s Hannity late Tuesday night. “They literally flew $1.7 billion in cash, in unmarked bills, on pallets in the dead of night into Iran. In a very real sense, the missiles that we saw fired at U.S. servicemen and women tonight were paid for by the billions that the Obama administration flooded the Ayatollah with.”
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Early reports indicate no Americans were killed during the airstrikes, which Iran took responsibility for and said was in retaliation for the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani. President Trump ordered the killing after receiving what he called “very major” intelligence that Soleimani was planning to kill Americans in the Middle East. Trump has not revealed details of the intelligence, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said “there was more risk” to Americans abroad in not killing the general.
The decision to kill Soleimani was met with cheers from the president’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill, such as Cruz, who have long criticized Obama for not doing more to curb Iranian aggression and proxy wars in the region.
“The last three years I’ve spent a lot of time with President Trump, urging him to pull out of Obama’s disastrous Iran deal,” Cruz said. “He did that, he took on his own State Department, his own Defense Department, and made the right decision.”
Some Democrats have come to Obama’s defense in recent days, saying the former president was trying to avoid a long and messy ground war in the Middle East.
“I believe that President Obama had a strategy of the JCPOA that would prevent Iran from becoming nuclear,” Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna said.
Pompeo reiterated that the Trump administration is committed to “never” letting Iran obtain a nuclear weapon.
“We need to stand up — the Ayatollah Khamenei is a radical religious zealot. He hates America,” Cruz warned, later stating, “The way to deal with threats like that is not through weakness, but through strength, and we saw that in taking out Soleimani this past week.”
The president said he would make a statement regarding the attack at the hands of Iran on Wednesday, tweeting that, “All is well,” after the incident.
