Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman James Risch (R-ID) during Thursday’s “America’s Newsroom” on Fox News Channel reacted to the recent missile attacks targeting U.S. military housed in Iraq.
Risch noted there is speculation Iran purposefully did not attempt to kill any Americans, but said things would be “different” had Iran taken any lives in their strike.
“You’ve heard the debate over whether they really … intentionally put their rockets in a place where no Americans would be hurt or killed,” Risch stated. “Look, they knew what the red line was. This thing had been escalating for the last year. The president set a red line that if you killed someone, we’re going to do something. They did, he did. And what he did was not proportional. It was substantially more than proportional and it was done intentionally to restore deterrence against Iran because they’d been pushing the envelope, they’d been escalating and he did what he did.”
He continued, “[T]here’s a debate as to whether or not they intended to hurt or kill somebody or whether they didn’t. I truly hope that they did not. I knew what was coming next. Once those rockets were launched, I was praying because had they taken American lives in that attack, we’d be in a very different place than we are right now. And heaven help us all.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
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