A top Democrat has slammed the White House for reneging on last year’s campaign promise not to drive the United States deeper into foreign wars.
“This is an astonishing double cross by Donald Trump to his supporters and to his pledge to Americans,” Vermont Senator Peter Welch told MSNBC after the president’s bombing campaign against three separate nuclear facilities in Iran.
Saturday’s attacks on nuclear sites in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan represent one of the most significant U.S. offensives against Iran since the Islamic Republic’s founding in 1979.
The historic assault has served to drag the White House firmly into the mounting Israel-Iran conflict, now the fifth active U.S. military engagement in the region after the war in Gaza and the Yemeni, Somali and Syrian civil wars.
The president’s decision to order the strikes represents a screeching U-turn on pledges made during his campaign last year, when he spoke repeatedly of the need to put an end to “forever wars” overseas by taking on “warmongers and America-last globalists.”
“This was Trump at his most impulsive,” Welch told MSNBC on Sunday. “[He] lied to the American people and to his voters promising he would not get us in[to] yet another Middle East war.”
The Vermont senator noted Trump had disregarded intelligence as to Iran’s nuclear capabilities from his own officials, who determined the Islamic Republic did not appear to have resumed its nuclear weapons program, suspended in 2003, and that even if it had, it would take at least three years for the country to develop the capacity for a nuclear strike.
That intel had already been preemptively undercut by Israel’s military offensive against Iran last week, launched off the back of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claims the extremist Islamist state had passed “the point of no return” in its nuclear ambitions and was as little as “months” away from building a nuclear weapon.
“Netanyahu sabotaged the negotiations [with Iran] and Trump willingly acceded to the Netanyahu agenda, which is also about regime change in Iran,” Welch added during his Saturday MSNBC appearance.
“In my view the last thing we need is a war, another war in the Middle East, and I’m one of the many in Congress that are going to be demanding that we vote on this,” he went on.
