RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas - U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar has given the benefit of the doubt to President Trump over his attack on Iran and will judge him in 30 days.
Cuellar said he did not support a resolution in Congress that was critical of the president’s actions in the Middle East.
“I voted no on this resolution that we had, because I wanted to give 30 days," Cuellar said. "I look at the military operation realities, and you can't stop everything. You can't tell a pilot, turn around in the middle and stop the funding and all that. I give it 30 days. So we filed legislation, along with some other folks, more moderate Democrats, and at the end of 30 days, Congress will come in and say, we play a role under Article One.”
Cuellar said he does want the U.S. to release more oil from its strategic reserves in order to drive down gas prices. He said there is no doubt the U.S. needed to deal with Iran.
“Anybody that doesn't see Iran as a threat… 47 years ago, they took our embassy workers, and I remember, I was in college, and they paraded them around for days, for quite a while,” Cuellar said.
Cuellar did not go back to 1953, when the U.S. and the U.K. helped engineer a coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh and impose a dictatorship led by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The U.K. and the U.S. were seeking to protect its oil interests after Mosaddegh nationalized the country’s oil industry. The Shah went on to rule the country for nearly 40 years.
Cuellar continued: “If you look at Iran, they have killed American soldiers throughout the Middle East over the years, and they have targeted American residents in the US. Also, they're the biggest state sponsor, of terrorism. And that doesn't even go into the nuclear situation."
“We need to make sure that we go after the military capacity, and we go after their center of gravity. What do I mean by center of gravity? Using military terms, that means you look at what drives their influence, their power and their stability. And we're doing that. So we're getting rid of their military capacity, that is ballistic missiles, the drones, and, of course, their navy. But also we're going after their industrial base, so they don't build this in a week after we stop the fighting.”
Cuellar said he hopes the military strikes on Iran have worked within the next 30 days.
“This has to be done in no more than four weeks. After four weeks, we need to find an exit. And I've asked… I’ve had some classified briefings. I can't go into it, but I've asked them, we need to know the why (we attacked Iran). We have a general idea of why. We need to know the timetable, and they kept playing around with the timetable. But then we need to have an exit strategy. If you don't have an exit strategy, you’ve got a problem.”
Here is the Rio Grande Guardian's interview with Rep. Cuellar:
