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(Bloomberg) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the US war effort in Iran, as well as the Trump administration’s global public health strategy amid a worsening Ebola outbreak, as he faced hostile questions from Democrats in two hearings before Congress on Tuesday.
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Rubio said the US military has destroyed much of Iran’s missile and naval capabilities, though he conceded Iran still has a lot of attack drones because they’re easy to manufacture. He also said Iran had laid mines in large portions of the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran has effectively closed since the start of the Pentagon’s Operation Epic Fury against Tehran — causing global energy prices to soar.
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“Operation Epic Fury — some of you didn’t like it, some of you did — was highly successful in achieving its military objectives, which is dramatically reducing the defense industrial base of Iran,” Rubio said on Tuesday morning in an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he was a member before joining the Trump cabinet.
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While Republicans lawmakers largely praised the US war on Iran and the administration’s moves in Latin America, Democrats seized their first public opportunity since January to confront President Donald Trump’s top diplomat. They repeatedly cast Trump and Rubio as architects of a failed war that has caused soaring energy prices and that’s unlikely to achieve curbs on Iran’s nuclear program that are remotely close to the 2015 deal from which Trump withdrew.
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Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told Rubio that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been waiting 40 years for a US president “who was both stupid and reckless enough to join him” in waging war on Iran. “The Trump foreign policy has become a dumpster fire,” Van Hollen said.
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Rubio was also pressed on the latest US response to the worsening Ebola outbreak in Africa, amid accusations that the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development and the country’s exit from the World Health Organization have hamstrung response efforts.
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Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate committee, displayed a large poster featuring a quote from billionaire Elon Musk — who led chaotic cost-cutting efforts early on in the Trump administration — conceding that “one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.”
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“Well, those programs were dismantled and today we have to screen for Ebola at Dulles airport rather than in the DRC and Uganda, more than 7,000 miles away,” she said, referring to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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On Iran, Rubio said the US has the prospect in the coming days of reaching an agreement with Iran on giving up any pursuit of a nuclear weapon and the handling of its highly enriched uranium.
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Yet Trump has veered from assurances of progress in the negotiations to threats of new attacks on Iran as his key demands — for Iran to agree to concessions on its nuclear program and reopen the Hormuz — remain unmet. The conflict, which the US and Israel launched in late February, has roiled markets, escalated gasoline prices and become increasingly unpopular among American voters months before midterm elections.
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