Sen. Andy Kim warns against U.S. ground troops in Iran

Sen. Andy Kim is urging President Trump and congressional Republicans to keep U.S. troops out of Iran, warning that a ground operation would be costly, dangerous and lack the approval of Congress and the American people.

“We cannot have American troops on the ground in Iran,” the New Jersey Democrat said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “This is going to be such a risky operation — and for what purpose?”

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported that the Pentagon is considering sending another 10,000 ground troops to the Middle East after 5,000 Marines and thousands of paratroopers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division have already been ordered to the region.

Sen. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, pushed back against concerns about the ongoing operation, saying the military’s objectives have been clear from the start and that it is on schedule.

“Every briefing I get — and I get briefed or have a phone call or meeting with administration officials almost every single day — says that our military operation is on time or ahead of schedule for every single line of effort,” Mr. Cotton said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Mr. Cotton said he expects the campaign to last “weeks, not months,” but warned against an early exit.

“We cannot stop early and allow Iran to have the military capability to continue to terrorize the United States and the rest of the civilized world,” he said.

Mr. Kim, who served as a State Department officer embedded with the military in Afghanistan and worked on the counter-IS fight, said a ground operation to secure Iran’s nuclear materials could take days or weeks. He warned that more than half of U.S. service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan died by improvised explosive devices “often at the hands of Iranian militia groups.”

“So putting that in that type of way is so risky, and again, at what cost,” he said.

Mr. Kim also said it would likely be done “certainly without Congress’s approval — and what that means is it would be without the American people’s approval.”

He tied the cost of the Iran conflict to kitchen-table concerns, saying the American people are footing the bill for a war while health care, grocery and gas prices continue to climb.

“There’s a reason why Donald Trump is not coming to the American people for approval for this war,” he said. “It’s because he knows what the American people feel, which is that they don’t want this.”