Watch: Dan Crenshaw Obliterates Two False Premises Democrats Are Operating From on Trump's Iran Foreign Policy

Dan Crenshaw

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) speaks on the Iran issue, 1/8/2020. Screen grab via C-SPAN.

In what was the equivalent of a mic drop moment, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) spoke out forcefully on Wednesday to debunk two key premises Democrats have been operating from on President Trump’s Iran foreign policy ever since news broke of the successful strike against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, which happened last week.

The first premise Crenshaw addressed was how Democrats were talking and acting like U.S. foreign policy towards Iran had somehow only started in the Trump era. In referencing his military history in the region, Crenshaw spoke of his first hand experience and that of his fellow sailors and soldiers in dealing with Soleimani’s IEDs, which have killed more than 600 U.S. servicemen and women, and seriously injured or maimed more than 1,600 others:

“I deployed into Iraq twice, into Afghanistan once. And after getting blown up, I deployed back to the Middle East in Bahrain. I have seen the Iranian threat network, have studied it closely. I’ve seen what their exported weapons [do] to our soldiers in Iraq. Over 600 killed by IEDs, specialized IEDs that were exported there from the Iranians.

Iranians are experts at surrogate warfare. They create sleeper cells in Bahrain right next to our Navy base, they stoked civil war in Yemen, in Iraq and in Syria. They’re experts at creating chaos.

Now the Democrats’ arguments rely on two false premises. One is that history began with Donald Trump’s strike against Soleimani. That is of course not true. History began long before that. The Iranians have been escalating against the United States for a very long time. Started in 1979.

More recently, they embarrassed our U.S. Navy sailors after they boarded a U.S. Navy vessel. They’ve shot down U.S. drones. They’ve put limpet mines on oil tankers, they’ve attacked Saudi oil facilities. They put rocket attacks towards our bases, and they orchestrated an attack against a U.S. embassy.

History began long before Donald Trump finally took action and stopped letting the Iranians punch us in the face.”

As to the second false premise, Crenshaw explained:

“The second false premise is that there is this false choice between doing nothing and all out war. The President is not taking us to all out war. There is a lot in between. We have to be more honest about that fact.

We have to set a red line and say that as the United States of America we will not be punished indefinitely. We have to take action. We had to respond. And the President did just that, and it’s time to unify behind our President instead of casting partisan stones. Thank you.”

Watch Crenshaw speak on this issue below:

Crenshaw is not the only high profile Texas Republican to aggressively stand behind Trump’s decision to strike Soleimani in response to the embassy attack and call out Democrats for their “blame Trump” mentality. Sen. Ted Cruz defended Trump’s call to take out Soleimani and also unloaded on the Obama administration’s disastrous Iran foreign policy in an interview on Sean Hannity’s program Tuesday night.

“In a very real sense, the missiles that we saw fired on U.S. servicemen and women tonight were paid for by the billions the Obama administration flooded the ayatollah with,” Cruz stated. “If history teaches anything, it’s don’t give billions of dollars to people who hate you and want to kill you.”