On Tuesday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said that with Iran, “I don’t like the final outcome here. I’m sure President Trump doesn’t like the outcome. He would have liked unconditional surrender. It didn’t happen. The Iranian people weren’t able to rise up.” And “If you’re going to recognize reality and realize that they still had a stranglehold over the straits and you want to open the straits up, there’s got to be some give and take.”
Johnson said, “I haven’t given up hope that, at some point in time, the Iranian people could rise up and overthrow the brutal dictatorship that is Iran. I’m sure that was the hope of the Trump administration, and of Israel, that if we bombed them sufficiently, if we degraded their capabilities, both nuclear, missile, drone, their navy, that that would weaken the regime enough for the Iranian people to take back the country. That wasn’t the case. … I will say the American people, by and large, an overwhelming — a majority did not want President Trump to introduce the type of ground troops to completely defeat the Revolutionary Guard and the brutal dictators of Iran, so here we are. Again, I don’t know what’s in the memorandum of understanding. We can always go back in, the minute they make a move toward their nuclear sites, we can bomb them again.”
He added, “There was no desire to do what had to be done, in terms of introducing ground troops, if we wanted to eliminate the regime. The Iranian people were not able to do it because they’re disarmed.” And that he wouldn’t have supported ground troops.
Johnson further stated, “It’s hard to get fanatics to just change overnight and go, oh, okay, we’ve seen the errors of our way. So, again, this is the reality on the ground. President Trump, I think, recognized that reality. And opened up the straits, again, devastating to parts of our economy if this thing would continue. So, he’s recognizing reality.”
He added, “If you’re going to recognize reality and realize that they still had a stranglehold over the straits and you want to open the straits up, there’s got to be some give and take. … I don’t like the final outcome here. I’m sure President Trump doesn’t like the outcome. He would have liked unconditional surrender. It didn’t happen. The Iranian people weren’t able to rise up.”
Johnson also said that “We can keep them in a box” and should bomb if Iran moves towards its nuclear sites again.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
