Top Trump administration officials insisted to nervous members of the House and Senate Tuesday that U.S. military moves in the Middle East are aimed at deterring Iranian aggression, not escalating tensions that some fear will lead to war.
The classified briefings led to mixed reactions from lawmakers, with Democrats more skeptical than Republicans about whether President Donald Trump’s administration has a strategy for calming the situation and containing Iran.
"It was not very enlightening from what they said in there in terms of how it's going to progress," Rep. Adam Smith, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters.
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a member of the panel, urged his colleagues to look at the administration’s information “with a discerning eye.”
“Nothing in the intelligence that I received today indicates that the administration would be justified in starting a war with Iran,” he said in a statement. “Escalation in this scenario would be a grave mistake.”
But Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, like other GOP lawmakers briefed Tuesday, said the administration's moves were "totally appropriate."
Romney told reporters "our intelligence community had a high degree of confidence that something might occur that would be of detriment to our personnel."
The briefings were held after lawmakers demanded an explanation from the administration for why it had issued a vague warning of an Iranian threat and sped up the deployment of an aircraft carrier and other warships to the Middle East.
Trump and various U.S. and Iranian officials have all said they do not seek a war. But both sides have warned the other of terrible consequences if either is attacked.
The briefers Tuesday included Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan, and Joe Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
Pompeo in particular spent several minutes of the House briefing going over the fraught history of U.S.-Iran relations, annoying Democrats who felt the focus was misplaced.
Lawmakers “stood up and said we know Iran is bad,” Smith said, adding that Pompeo had essentially said the administration was too “busy” to brief Congress earlier, an answer Smith said was not acceptable.
Smith also noted that despite the Trump administration's pursuit of a "maximum pressure campaign" on Iran with heavy use of sanctions, Tehran continues to support militant groups and carry out other moves viewed as dangerous by the United States.
Mike McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee praised the briefing as very “credible.”
He said the Iranians had used proxy militias to carry out a number of attacks, including the launching of a rocket that landed near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
It was not immediately clear whether McCaul was attributing that rocket launch to Iran due to what he’d heard in the briefing, but other observers have been more cautious in directly blaming Iran.
McCaul said the administration was clearly deploying its military assets as an act of deterrence.
“The fact is they’re the ones who are being aggressive,” McCaul said of the Iranians.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine