struck<\/a> three Iranian targets just yesterday,” she pointed out. “You’ve said over 50% of your district is comprised of service members, veterans, law enforcement, first responders. Would you tell them that the U.S. is in a ‘small potatoes’ military conflict?”<\/p>\n“No,” Lawler responded confidently. “Anytime you are at war or in a military escalation, it is certainly not ‘small potatoes.’ It is serious. I think we all recognize that.”<\/p>\n
The congressman continued, though, seemingly moving past his disagreement with Trump to explain why he believes the war carries significant stakes:<\/p>\n
Uh, ensuring Iran does not possess a nuclear weapon, stopping them from continuing to finance terrorism \u2014 Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other terror proxies \u2014 stopping them from mass-producing ballistic missiles, drones, which are being used by Russia against Ukraine, is critical, and much of the military operation has been focused on depleting their military capabilities.<\/p>\n
And in recent, uh, months, making sure that they are not blocking the ability of commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil is back up to about 70% of what it was, uh, in terms of flowing through the Strait prior to the conflict.<\/p>\n
We want to continue the flow, but remember, we don’t rely on petroleum out of Iran. That is China. And part of what’s happened over the last year, you’ve seen, the removal of Maduro in Venezuela and the blockade against Iranian oil flowing has severely impacted China’s capabilities of getting oil from Venezuela and Iran. That is something that I’ve targeted legislatively with the SHIP Act, the Iran-China Energy Sanctions Act, and something we must continue to pursue in terms of enacting strong sanctions against China.<\/p>\n
Watch above on CNN.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) broke with President Donald Trump over his characterization of the war with Iran, telling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":280935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[34,361,76460,21464,34378,392],"class_list":["post-280934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-iran","tag-iranian","tag-lawler","tag-mike-lawler","tag-scott","tag-trump"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117226210914575023","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}