House Panel Challenges Defense Official on Iran Military Strategy

(WASHINGTON) – Republican and Democratic lawmakers are voicing frustration with the Pentagon’s lack of communication with Congress about the escalating war in Iran.

Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of Defense, told the House Armed Services Committee this week that the agency is carrying out President Donald Trump’s strategy and insisted that the war is a pragmatic, short-term operation.

The House Armed Services Committee convenes to discuss U.S. foreign policy. (Ellie Jornlin/Capital News Service)

“This is not another Iraq War, this is not nation-building,” Colby said. “We’re not isolationists, we’re flexible realists.”

U.S. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) reminded him that President George W. Bush had said the same thing at the onset of the Iraq War.

“President Bush said, our mission is clear, to disarm weapons of mass destruction, to end the regime’s support for terrorism and to free the Iraqi people,” she said during the Thursday hearing.

The Iraq War lasted eight years, Jacobs added, “and it cost thousands of American lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars.”

It also cost the lives of about 405,000 Iraqis, according to a 2013 University of Washington study. Since the Feb. 28 joint strikes by Israel and the U.S., civilian deaths in Iran have surpassed 1,000, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency.

Republicans voiced their support for the action in Iran, but they also urged communication with Congress.

“We do have to speak for our allies and their ambassadors … and if what we’re telling them is not consistent with what the president’s doing, it will make our jobs more difficult,” U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.) said at the hearing.

Democrats on the panel sharply criticized the Pentagon official.

“We’re concerned that the president, his staff and his ‘minions’ are disrespecting the Congress of the United States [and] this committee,” U.S. Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) said.

Members asked Colby about a piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2019, in which he wrote, “The threat from Iran pales in comparison to that from China.”

Colby responded, “I think I’ve always said it [Iran] may belong as a threat, and we’re going out there with scoped military objectives. I’m very supportive of this, of this operation.”

Rep. Sarah Elfreth (D-Md.) is Maryland’s sole representative on the committee.

She didn’t speak at the hearing, but in an email she wrote, “After the president boldly declared that Iran’s nuclear program was set back decades by a first set of strikes less than a year ago, we are once again attacking Iran without more clarity, legal justification, or consultation of Congress.”

By Ellie Jornlin and Will Hammann

Capital News Service