{"id":317083,"date":"2026-03-02T00:39:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T00:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/317083\/"},"modified":"2026-03-02T00:39:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T00:39:12","slug":"trump-allies-defend-us-israel-strikes-on-iran-as-democrats-call-it-a-war-of-choice-us-israel-war-on-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/317083\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump allies defend US-Israel strikes on Iran as Democrats call it a \u2018war of choice\u2019 | US-Israel war on Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump administration allies reinforced on Sunday the administration\u2019s messaging on the Israel-US strikes on Iran<\/a>, while Democrats decried it as a \u201cwar of choice\u201d that required congressional approval.<\/p>\n

On Sunday talk shows, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, who serves on the Armed Services Committee, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham and Texas senator Ted Cruz defended the strikes, while Virginia senator Mark Warner, vice-chairman of the Committee on Intelligence, and other Democrats<\/a> welcomed the elimination of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but said the administration must now answer vital questions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not going to shed any tears over the death of the Iranian leadership,\u201d Warner told CNN\u2019s State of the Union. \u201cThe question is why now? Why not make the case to the American public?\u201d<\/p>\n

Warner said Trump had started \u201ca war of choice\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no imminent threat to the United States,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s incumbent that the president comes before the American people and Congress to make the case on why he\u2019s chosen to go to war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warner has warned that the strikes risk pulling the US into another broad conflict in the Middle East. On Sunday, he went further, pointing to a lack of US intelligence visibility into the Iranian resistance to its theocratic leadership or who may replace Khamenei.<\/p>\n

\u201cWill the president\u2019s supporters still say this is a great move if the person who replaces the supreme leader is even further to the right and actually rushes forward on their nuclear program,\u201d Warner said, pointing out that Khamenei maintained Iran\u2019s nuclear enrichment program but did not approve moving to full weaponization.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have very little visibility into what happens next,\u201d Warner said. A populist revolution and a reduction in regional violence \u201cwould be a wonderful outcome,\u201d he added, but \u201cI don\u2019t believe that will happen\u201d. A deeply-embedded Iranian leadership, he predicted, \u201cwill fight vociferously to try to maintain their power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Administration allies took a different position, saying that there was no doubt that Iran was going to continue to target US bases and allies in the region.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why it was so vitally necessary to put an end to Iran\u2019s 47-year campaign of terror and revolutionary violence once and for all,\u201d Cotton told CNN. He add that Iran had crossed the red lines of the civilized world going back to the 1979 hostage crisis.<\/p>\n

Trump, he said, \u201chas finally put his foot down and made it clear that we will no longer tolerate the revolutionary violence of the Islamic republic of Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked if the decapitation of the Iranian leadership would achieve regime change, Cotton said the immediate threat was Iran\u2019s military capabilities. \u201cWe\u2019ve always said Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. They also can\u2019t be allowed to have a vast missile arsenal and that\u2019s what they have\u201d.<\/p>\n

Cotton repeated the strategic maxim that administration officials have used in recent days.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have thousands and thousands of missiles, much more than what the United States and Israel have in missile defense combined.\u201d Cotton said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s much easier to kill the archer on the ground than it is to shoot his arrow out of the sky,\u201d he added. \u201cWhat you will see in the days ahead will be a methodical and systematic focus on Iran\u2019s missiles, it\u2019s missile launchers, and ultimately its missile manufacturing capability.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking to NBC\u2019s Face the Nation, Cotton added that the administration does not see US ground troops in Iran unless they are part of a search-and-rescue for a downed pilot. \u201cThe president has no plan for any kind of large scale ground force inside of Iran,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He predicted that if Democrats force a vote on the strikes through the War Powers act, there will be \u201coverwhelming Republican support for our troops and for the president\u2019s decision to finally eliminate the threat of Iran\u201d.<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cI would invite Democrats in the Congress to join their Democratic colleagues like John Fetterman and Josh Gottheimer and Greg Landsman in supporting our troops, in finally putting America\u2019s foot down against the Islamic Republic of Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cruz, the Republican senator who was with Trump in Texas on Friday, was asked why diplomacy with Iran had been abandoned. \u201cBecause the diplomacy was an abject failure,\u201d Cruz told CBS\u2019s Face the Nation. \u201cThe Iranians approached the diplomacy with arrogance\u201d.<\/p>\n

He said he had advised the president that the only deal he should accept was the one he\u2019d \u201coffered Maduro, which is if you want to leave and flee the country, you can do so. Anything else is unacceptable. And Khamenei made his choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a separate interview, Graham disputed the characterization of a war.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if this is technically a war,\u201d Graham told NBC\u2019s Meet the Press. \u201cThe leader of the largest state sponsor of terrorism and his inner team are dead. The mother ship that fuels the proxies is in sinking mode.\u201d He added: \u201cThe goal of this operation is to change the threat, not the regime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graham also pushed back against former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote on Saturday that Republican leadership had gone back on a campaign promise of \u201cno more foreign wars\u201d. Graham said that Trump campaigned on a promise \u201cto keep us safe, to stand up to people who would hurt America. She\u2019s a former congressman for a reason\u201d.<\/p>\n

The California congressman Ro Khanna rejected Graham\u2019s position that the world is safer without the supreme leader, telling NBC\u2019s Meet the Press the senator is \u201cthe face of Republican foreign policy\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s been consistent, but he\u2019s been consistently wrong,\u201d Khanna said. \u201cLet me say this: Khamenei was a brutal dictator, but Americans are not safer today. Senator Graham cheered us into the Iraq war. He cheered us into the effort with Libya. And Trump ran against him in 2016.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe said regime change wars are absolute failures. And that has escaped Donald Trump<\/a>,\u201d Khanna continued. \u201cThe question is: is the country going to descend in civil war? Are billions of our dollars going to be spent there? Are American troops going to be at risk?\u201d<\/p>\n

Not all Democrats were in unison. Pennsylvania\u2019s Democratic senator, John Fetterman, who frequently bucks his party\u2019s positions, told CNN that his support for the strikes on Iran is \u201cof course, not limitless\u201d but added: \u201cMy support was that they could never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb. Every single member of the Senate says we should never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb. President Trump was the guy willing to do that, to make sure that didn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump administration allies reinforced on Sunday the administration\u2019s messaging on the Israel-US strikes on Iran, while Democrats…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":317084,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-317083","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/317084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}