Sen. Tom Cotton calls for unauthorized 'retaliatory strike' on Iran with 'the fire and fury...

[struggle4progress]

22. The danger of Tom Cotton

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

... 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 ...

... In May, Cotton appeared on PBS’s “Firing Line,” where host Margaret Hoover asked him, “Could we win a war with Iran?” Cotton answered “yes” with a speed that seemed to surprise Hoover: “That didn’t take you a second,” she replied. And it was here that things got alarming: “Two strikes,” said Cotton, “the first strike and the last strike,” would be enough to win.

This is, to put it mildly, delusional ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/16/danger-tom-cotton/?utm_term=.3975e1e9d742