Three leading Republican senators slammed President Obama on Thursday as being “disconnected from reality,” saying his efforts to accommodate Iran for the sake of ongoing nuclear talks have brought the Middle East to the brink of widespread sectarian conflict.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain of Arizona, with panel members Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, spoke as a civil war in Yemen threatened to explode into a region-wide contest between Sunni-led Arab countries and Iran’s Shiite theocracy and its Arab proxies.
“This is a tipping point. This is a time in history when things have turned for the worse,” Graham said. “God help us all.”
The Obama administration has offered tentative support for a Saudi-led coalition’s launching of airstrikes against the advance of Iran-backed Shiite Houthi militias in Yemen, while insisting that dialogue among all parties remains the only solution to the country’s problems.
Egypt is backing the operation, known as “Decisive Storm,” and Pakistan also is considering sending troops to an expected ground operation against the Houthis.
Iran has condemned the move, and its chief regional proxy in the Arab world, the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement, said it “lacks wisdom and rationale and legal legitimacy … [and] is moving the region towards more tensions and risks.”
In a conference call with Gulf Cooperation Council foreign ministers from Lausanne, Switzerland, Secretary of State John Kerry “commended the work of the coalition taking military action against the Houthis” and said U.S. support included “intelligence sharing, targeting assistance, and advisory and logistical support for strikes against Houthi targets,” State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters.
Kerry’s call came on the sidelines of nuclear talks with Iranian officials. Rathke said the secretary discussed Yemen briefly in his meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, but would not provide details of the conversation, saying the nuclear issue was the principal focus of the conversation.
Obama and other administration officials have insisted on keeping U.S. policy toward Iran focused solely on the nuclear talks, in spite of congressional pressure to press Tehran on its support of terrorism, aggression toward neighboring Arab states and its holding of U.S. citizens on questionable charges. Administration officials say the best way to deal with those issues is to first ensure Iran won’t be able to develop a nuclear weapon.
McCain, Graham and Ayotte have been among the harshest congressional critics of the administration’s policy, and on Thursday said Obama’s policy has opened the door to a regional war — a position endorsed by many experts, who have warned for years that U.S. complacency in the face of Iranian expansion could fuel a wider sectarian conflict and do long-term damage to the nation’s interests in the Middle East.
“I think it already is out of control,” said James Phillips, a Middle East expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “I think it’s going to get a lot worse.”
McCain noted that U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Lloyd Austin had told his panel earlier in the day that the Saudis had not given him advance notice of the intervention and said it was a sign of how low the Obama administration had allowed relations with Arab allies to slip to keep nuclear talks going.
“Our closest allies in the region no longer trust us,” McCain said. “That is because they believe we are siding with Iran.”
In a statement supporting the operation, Turkey’s foreign ministry said its government had been informed of the operation in advance.
