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Republican defense hawks are urging President Trump to unleash major combat operations as the commander-in-chief weighs a “massive attack” on Iran.
These signals coincide with Trump’s escalatory rhetoric against the Islamic Republic, with negotiations completely stalled and Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen striking commercial boats in the Red Sea, threatening to expand the conflict.
The support for expanded kinetic action comes as the price of oil hit $100 a barrel on Thursday for the first time since May and as the conflict’s popularity among the public plunges.
Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said he spoke to the president multiple times this week on Iran and encouraged him to continue pounding the country, with negotiations appearing fruitless.
“I’ve expressed publicly and privately my approval of finishing the job, and realizing that negotiations were getting us nowhere,” Wicker told The Hill on Thursday. “I’ve made it clear that that Iran, in my judgment, has no intention of negotiating in good faith or keeping a promise and that it’s pointless to pretend that they are trustworthy negotiating party.
“I believe we can keep the Strait open on our terms, and that’s the key to a successful conclusion of hostilities,” he said of the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump has said he is weighing resumption of major combat operations against Iran but has not made a final call or set a deadline for it.
“I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it,” the president said in a Thursday interview with Axios.
The U.S. military has carried out airstrikes against Iran for 13 days in a row as of Thursday. U.S. forces have targeted the country’s maritime capabilities, missile and drone storage facilities, coastal surveillance sites, air defense assets, aircraft hangars, military logistics infrastructure, command centers, communications networks and other assets, according to the U.S. Central Command (Centcom), which oversees the U.S. forces operations in the Middle East.
Centcom declined to disclose to The Hill how many targets the U.S. military has hit in the last 12 days.
Iran has retaliated by firing ballistic and cruise missiles, along with one-way attack drones, at U.S. allies in the Gulf. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said it fired at Kuwait and Jordan overnight, including at a communications tower.
The Kuwaiti military said Thursday its air defense systems were working on shooting down Iranian drones and missiles.
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), a close Trump ally who is vying to be the next chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), said the U.S. military needs to clobber Iran “as hard as we possibly can right now.”
“I would do everything I possibly can right now to turn them around. So that’d be my thought,” Jackson said Thursday.
“I just think maximum pressure from the air and maximum security of the Strait; anything they have that they could possibly use to cause problems in the Strait needs to be destroyed,” he said.
When asked how much the U.S. military needs to ramp up its airstrike campaign to bring Iran to the negotiating table, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.), who also sits on HASC, praised Trump for being the only president to “have big enough balls” to bring Tehran to the negotiating table and emphasized that what brought them there were “massive bombing strikes.”
“We got to remember the goal. This is to make sure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon ever. They’ve been able to open and close the straits willy-nilly for 50 years with conventional weapons. If they had a nuclear umbrella over that, it becomes a binary choice: nuclear war, which no one wants, or these radical Muslim mullahs having control over the Strait of Hormuz in perpetuity,” Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL, said in an interview. “Those are unacceptable choices.”
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who retired as a brigadier general in the Air Force, said Iran “needs to initiate peace,” because if the U.S. does it, “they’re going to think it’s weakness.”
The Nebraska Republican said Tehran needs to know that it is being “crushed” militarily and is forced to “stick their hand out to say please stop.”
“That’s what we got to wait for,” said Bacon, who also is a member of HASC.
But Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), a former Marine helicopter pilot, said Iran has shown nothing but “defiance” and never shown “good faith” in diplomatic talks. He added that Trump is in the delicate position of handling the conflict in the Middle East with the midterms encroaching and the administration attempting to keep its majority in both chambers.
“This should be one of those things that I think we need to bring to the end swiftly. It’s an unfortunate cycle of politics right now. I used to teach the evolution of warfare, and wars never become more popular over time. The faster you end them, the better,” McCormick, who sits on HASC, said in an interview.
“Even when it’s violent because you’ll save lives. Ultimately, you save lives by being decisive and violent and turning the people against their own leadership. There’s no way that Iran bends to us until we make it so uncomfortable that their people rise up.”
McCormick, who was in the Navy Medical Corps, said the U.S. needs regime change in Iran and advised Trump to trust his instincts on the matter.
“It’s the only thing that I think is going to solve this,” he said. “It would be transformational to world politics. It would bring peace to the Middle East, which we haven’t had in my lifetime; it would literally reinforce the Abraham Accords.”
Democrats, who have criticized Trump’s decision to launch Operation Epic Fury and have worked on halting U.S. military operations in the region through war powers resolutions, said many “major” issues were ducked or ignored or were not addressed in the lead-up to the war.
“It’s clear, they had no plans,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a senior member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said on Thursday.
“This administration keeps people in the dark, and the president just makes the decision that he thinks, as he usually says, ‘I just call it right.’ … It is a stunning way to approach foreign policy,” he added.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who is the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Middle East and North Africa, said the conflict has been “so botched” that it is “by no means clear what is the right move at this time.”
“I think it’s critical that the Strait of Hormuz be a free shipping lane, not subject to Iranian control. But I have no idea what steps are necessary to achieve that goal,” Sherman said in a phone interview.
But the California Democrat noted Iran is “incredibly vulnerable” and that the country’s electric generation facilities are “legitimate military targets” to the extent that they provide power to the Iranian military or to weapons manufacturing facilities.
“It is entirely legal for the United States to try to stop them from manufacturing drones that are terrorizing ships in a free navigation strait,” Sherman said, adding that he has not received a classified briefing on the Iran war recently.
The U.S. has surged firepower to the Middle East in recent weeks. The U.S. has sent F-35s and F-16 fighter jets to the Centcom theater. Multiple Air Force C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft were flying from Germany to Israel and Jordan last week, The Hill and other news outlets have reported.
Over 150 medics recently arrived at Germany’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a U.S. Army post near Ramstein Air Base, a U.S. official familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss military planning, told The Hill on Thursday.
Since the major hostilities resumed in early July, the U.S. military has suffered casualties, and the number of injured service members has risen. Eighteen service members have been killed in the conflict, and more than 500 have been injured. The Pentagon confirmed Monday that nearly 100 service members have been wounded since July 7, but 96 percent of them have returned to duty.
The uptick in kinetic action comes as the public’s support for it is declining, including among Trump’s supporters. Just 24 percent of Americans think the conflict was worth the cost, a June poll by Reuters/Ipsos found. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said in a Reuters survey released last week that the U.S. military will remain engaged in the war for “an extended period of time.”
Earlier this week, a Politico poll found that nearly 1 in 5 MAGA voters said the U.S. should end the conflict regardless of the costs.
Still, Trump claimed that the U.S. is doing “very well” in the war against Iran.
“I would say better than anybody expected could be done,” the president said Thursday.
Max Rego contributed.
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