Senate Democrat rips Trump, Netanyahu over ‘dumb war’

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) on Monday ripped President Trump for “following” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in launching a major military action against Iran, something that senior administration officials said they felt compelled to do after Israel revealed its plans to attack with or without U.S. support.

“It frustrates me that we didn’t learn the lessons from 2003,” Gallego said in an interview with MS NOW’s Chris Hayes, referring to President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq more than 20 years ago.

“And what are our country leaders doing? They’re following Netanyahu, who has literally told us — he just told on TV — that he’s been trying to do this for 47 years,” Gallego said of Netanyahu’s long-held priority of degrading Iran’s war-fighting ability and toppling its theocratic authoritarian regime.

“There’s a lot of ways that we could be supportive of Israel. There’s a lot of ways that we could defend Israel’s existence, its sovereignty. I’m 100 percent for that. But we don’t need to go to war for them, especially when it’s a dumb war,” he declared.

Gallego made his comments after senior Trump national security officials told lawmakers in a classified briefing Monday that Trump ordered preemptive strikes against Iran because the administration feared that Iran would hit U.S. bases and installations in retaliation for a planned strike by Israel.

“There are two reasons why now. The first is it was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States,” Rubio told reporters at the Capitol, explaining the timing of the joint U.S.-Israel strikes.

Rubio revealed that the United States had intelligence that Iran had ordered field commanders to retaliate against U.S. troops if Israel launched an attack against its missile arsenal.

“If we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties,” he said.

 “So, the president made the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he added.

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