Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton condemned the president’s strategy for defeating terrorism and bashed the little reassurance the Obama administration has given Americans that national security is the administration’s top priority.
The first-term senator used the GOP weekly address on Saturday to slam President Obama for how he handled recent terrorism attacks in Brussels, Belgium.
“President Obama reportedly likes to point out that more Americans die each year from bathtub falls and car accidents than from terrorism. Maybe so. But bathtub falls aren’t spreading an apocalyptic ideology and car crashes can’t be weaponized against American cities,” Cotton said.
Cotton, a member of the Senate Committees on Armed Services and Intelligence, called the president’s desire for the public to “chill out” a failure to unite people around a solution.
“These aren’t communication mistakes by the president. They’re a feature, not a bug, of his foreign policy,” Cotton added. “He ransomed American hostages for another $1.7 billion. He’s refused to condemn and punish Iran’s ballistic-missile tests as violations of U.N. resolutions. He’s freed seven convicted Iranian criminals and dismissed arrest warrants against 14 Iranian fugitives. And now, the president may grant Iran access to the dollar, which would declare it truly ‘open for business.'”
The senator turned to what the GOP-led Congress will do to protect the country from the Islamic State and avoid granting additional concessions to Iran.
The recently introduced Iran Ballistic Missile Sanctions Act would punish Iran’s ayatollahs if they develop a missile with a nuclear wearhead that is capable of reaching the U.S.
The GOP Congress would also move to punish Iran’s support for terrorism and domestic oppression through the Iran Terrorism and Human Rights Sanctions Act, which was introduced by a number of sponsors in March.
Finally, if the president gives Iran access to U.S. currency in financial transactions, Cotton promised lawmakers would take “appropriate action.”
“Republicans understand, unlike the president, that we do not and cannot have ‘shared values’ with the radical, terror-sponsoring regime in Iran any more than we can with the Islamic State,” Cotton said. “The right strategy against the threat of radical Islam is to confront this radical ideology and defeat it on the battlefield before it grows larger and stronger, or obtains nuclear weapons.”
