Sen. Cotton says U.S. could pursue targeted attack on Iran

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton is urging the Obama administration to keep the option of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities on the table, saying such a move could be a targeted attack over several days — not a massive military engagement.

Cotton, a first-term senator from Arkansas, has been a vocal opponent of a nuclear deal with Iran and spearheaded a letter from 47 senators to Iran’s top leaders to let them know that any nuclear deal they reach would be “nothing more than an executive order.”


“Even if military action were required — and we certainly should have kept the threat of military force on the table throughout, which always improves diplomacy — the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East, as we saw in Iraq,” Cotton said in an interview on Family Research Council’s radio program “Washington Watch With Tony Perkins” that was first reported by BuzzFeed. “That’s simply not the case.”

Cotton also accused President Barack Obama of offering “the ultimate false choice” last week when Obama presented the preliminary deal as “either this deal or war.”

Instead, Cotton said the U.S. could pursue a focused military strike.

“It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox,” Cotton said. “Several days’ air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions.”

Cotton added, “All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill Clinton was.”