Republican lawmakers have lined up to criticize the timing and nature of President Joe Biden's retaliation for the deaths of three U.S. service members in a drone strike blamed on Iran.
The Pentagon said it had carried out airstrikes in response to last Sunday's drone strike on the Tower 22 base in northeastern Jordan, near the Syrian border, which also injured dozens of personnel.
Friday's strikes in Iraq and Syria hit command and control centers, rockets, missiles and drone storage facilities. They also struck logistics and munition supply chain facilities connected to Tehran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated groups, the U.S. military said.
Biden had been under pressure to hit back and, two days later, the president said he had decided what that response would be, without revealing further details.
Newsweek contacted the White House for comment on Saturday.
However, Republican Senator Tom Cotton criticized the Biden administration's response and compared it to what previous GOP presidents had done when confronted by Tehran's belligerency.
"When facing threats from Iran, President Reagan sank half their navy. President Trump killed Qasem Soleimani," the Arkansas lawmaker posted on X on Friday, referring to the assassination of the IRGC commander in 2020.
"In contrast, President Biden's anemic response to Iran's attacks—combined with tens of billions of dollars of funding—has only emboldened the ayatollahs further," Cotton added.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) posted on X that the Biden administration "spent nearly a week foolishly telegraphing U.S. intentions to our adversaries." GOP representative Byron Donalds (R-FL), a vocal Trump supporter who backed the former president's unproven claims about 2020 U.S. election fraud, wrote on X that the strikes "should have occurred the SAME DAY our servicemembers were killed."
Michael Butler, associate professor of political science at Clark University, Massachusetts, told Newsweek that the delay to the U.S. response may have been partly due to the greater coordination and scope of the strike compared to the initial U.S. assaults on Houthi targets following the Yemeni group's attacks on Red Sea shipping.
"I suspect part of that delay also involved back-channel communications with the Iranian regime as a way of forestalling a retaliation from Tehran," Butler said. "Time will tell whether that is the case, and if so, whether that outreach delivers the desired effect.
"It seems clear that the Shia militias have outbid their Iranian sponsors, but today's strike is significant enough to make it difficult for Iran to climb down," he added.
Other U.S. lawmakers condemned Biden. House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement that the Biden administration had not acted decisively enough and should "admit that its strategy of appeasing Iran has been disastrous."
Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) posted that the response "has been disastrous to the point of being dangerous." He said if the Yemeni-based Houthis "continue to use Iranian missiles and Iranian intelligence from Iranian spy ships to target U.S. Navy vessels in the Red Sea, we will sink those Iranian spy ships."
"That is how you begin to reestablish deterrence," Sullivan added, also calling for reimposing comprehensive sanctions on Iran's oil and gas sectors.
On Friday, Biden attended the ceremony in which the troops' remains were returned to the U.S., called a dignified transfer, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The strikes the same day are the first in what American officials have described as a tiered response to Iranian-backed militias.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at the Washington-based Defense Priorities think tank, which lobbies for U.S. foreign policy restraint. He told Newsweek that Biden's aim was to degrade the militias' capabilities in Syria and Iraq to stop them attacking U.S. forces in those countries. DePetris added that this policy was "unlikely to succeed."
"Previous U.S. strikes in Iraq and Syria over the last three months failed to deter much of anything and in fact contributed to the ongoing tit-for-tat dynamics we see today," DePetris said.
"This has less to do with a lack of U.S. resolve and more to do with the inherent difficulties of influencing the decisionmaking of non-state actors, who don't have to worry about defending territory, regime preservation, or maintaining a favorable balance of power."
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Brendan Cole is a Newsweek Senior News Reporter based in London, UK. His focus is Russia and Ukraine, in particular ... Read more
