Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) fired back at Vice President Joe Biden for his criticisms of the letter to Iran sent by Cotton and 46 other GOP Senators on Tuesday’s “Morning Joe” on MSNBC.
“Joe Biden, as Barack Obama’s own secretary of defense has said, has been wrong about nearly every major foreign policy and national security decision in the last 40 years. Moreover, Joe Biden so respects the dignity of the institution of the Senate, he should be insisting that the president submit any deal to approval of the Senate, which is exactly what he did on numerous deals during his time in the Senate” he said.
Earlier, Cotton stated, “I and 46 other Senators are simply speaking for the American people. Your own network just released a poll that said 71% of Americans don’t think a deal that the president is negotiating will stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The point we’re making to Iran’s leaders, who, if you talk to many Iran experts, will say don’t understand our Constitution, is that if Congress doesn’t approve a deal, Congress won’t accept a deal, now or in the future.”
He also reacted to President Obama saying that Cotton and the other 46 Senators were aligned with Iran’s hardliners, “they are nothing but hardliners in Tehran. They’ve been killing Americans for 35 years. They killed hundreds of troops in Iraq. Now, they control five capitals in the Middle East. There are nothing but hardliners in Tehran. and if they do — if they do all those things without a nuclear weapon, imagine what they’ll do with a nuclear weapon. That’s why we’re trying to stop them from getting a bomb.”
Cotton further argued, that an acceptable deal would require “complete nuclear disarmament,” “i think we have to have a credible threat of military force on the table. but, the real alternative, as Prime Minister Netanyahu said, to a bad deal is a better deal, with more sanctions, with confronting Iran, with only giving them the choice of the deal that would completely disarm their nuclear weapons program…Israel struck Iraq’s nuclear program in 1981 and they didn’t reconstitute it. Israel struck Syria’s nuclear reactor in 2007, they haven’t yet reconstituted it. Rogue regimes have a way of getting the picture when there’s a credible threat of military force on the table that we will not allow the world’s worst regimes to get the world’s worst weapons.”
The discussion concluded with anchor Joe Scarborough telling Cotton “keep up the good fight,” to which Mike Brzezinski “don’t say that, he might take us to a war.”
(h/t Mediaite)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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