The danger of Tom Cotton

Source: Washington Post

The danger of Tom Cotton

By James Downie
Opinions editor
June 16 at 6:11 PM

Ask anyone in politics to describe Sen. Tom Cotton’s foreign policy, and the first word you hear is likely to be “hawkish.” Yet despite this well-deserved reputation, the Arkansas Republican has managed to surprise interviewers twice in recent weeks with just how welcoming he is of conflict.

On Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” Cotton followed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who forcefully argued that evidence proves Iran was behind Thursday’s attacks on two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. It should be noted that other countries such as Germany and Japan do not believe that the evidence released so far proves that Iran was behind the attacks. But overconfident predictions about intelligence have never backfired on the United States, aside from that one war about supposed weapons of mass destruction that dragged on for years with hundreds of thousands of deaths. Regardless, when host Margaret Brennan asked whether the president had the authority to strike Iran, Pompeo thankfully dismissed the idea, saying, “I don’t want to get into hypotheticals.”

Cotton took a different view:

Taken aback, Brennan asked, “Are you — you’re comparing the tanker war in the ’80s to now, and saying that that’s the kind of military response you want to see?” Cotton affirmed the comparison and his preferred response. He left out that the U.S. action under Reagan came after several years and hundreds of attacks on tankers by both sides of the Iran-Iraq War. The current situation is far calmer, yet Cotton is champing at the bit for another U.S. strike on a Middle Eastern country.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/16/danger-tom-cotton/