Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, the ranking Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee, said during a Sunday interview with George Stephanopoulos that the story of Iran “is not over.”
Thornberry, who was with President Trump in the Situation Room on Thursday following the Iranian attack on an unarmed U.S. Navy drone, described the scene as, “The president, after laying out the intelligence situation, was really listening to everyone’s views … my takeaway was that there was no one around the table who said we should do nothing. Everyone agreed that shooting down an unarmed American aircraft deserved a response.”
He continued, “Now, there was some variation of views about whether it should be kinetic or whether sanctions, cyber, you know, the level of response, but most everybody thought it should be on the lower end of the range of possibilities that the president was provided.”
After Thornberry and committee members left the White House, Trump made the decision not to bomb specific radar and missile battery targets in Iran, a choice he made after military aircraft were in the air. He reportedly backed down from the attack after he learned that 150 Iranians could be killed.
When asked about how he felt about Trump’s decision not to strike, Thronberry said, “Well, I think it’s a hard judgment call. The president is clearly trying to navigate a fine line to show that you cannot attack Americans and American military equipment without having a response. At the same time, he’s very conscious of not getting on an escalatory ladder that leads to a military conflict that neither side wants.”
After being further questioned as to whether he felt the president’s actions were proportional to the shoot down of the U.S. drone, and whether Iran would back down from increasing violence, Thornberry said, “Well, that’s going to really depend on the Iranians. This story is not over. And the question is how do they respond to this relatively restrained response by President Trump … I think it’s hard to criticize the president for giving them every opportunity. But there’s obviously a limit to that. And that’s why I say if Iran goes back to mining tankers, the sorts of things they’ve been doing here lately, then we have a whole range of military and other responses which we can employ.”
