Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, joined Newsmax on Tuesday to straighten out the ignorant, namely President Joe Biden, who think that a tough response against Iran would somehow trigger an all-out war in the Middle East.
Crenshaw called for a "disproportionate" response to the drone strike that killed three American service members, and he's growing tired of the chorus from the White House about avoiding an expanded conflict.
"It depends on what you do," Crenshaw told "Rob Schmitt Tonight" when asked if he was at all concerned about all-out war. "Like, if you send a missile directly into the Ayatollah's bedroom, you might have an actual war. But that's not what we're talking about.
"People ... don't understand the Middle East, they don't understand foreign relations, they don't understand war. And so people believe that it's a binary choice," Crenshaw told Schmitt. "You either do nothing and you let them keep hitting you, or you're in an all-out war. And that's never true. There's a lot of options in between. And I think that's what people need to understand."
Biden said it again earlier Tuesday, talking about how he doesn't want a response triggering all-out war in the Mideast.
"Why the president said that, I don't know. Nobody is talking about going to actual war. There's nobody introducing a bill to declare war on Iran right now. That's really not on the table," Crenshaw said. "But you do need deterrence."
Crenshaw had two words for Schmitt: Qasem. Soleimani.
"And let's just look back to what President [Donald] Trump did. He killed Qasem Soleimani while he was on a layover in Baghdad. You want escalatory? That was pretty escalatory," he said. "But what it also did was reestablished our deterrence and sent a message to the Iranians that you should not mess with us because we are willing to do things you didn't think we were willing to do."
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Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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