President Joe Biden is “deliberately” sabotaging any element of surprise in his planned response to the recent killing of three U.S. troops in an attack by Iran-backed militias, according to Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), who is calling for both a “strong military response” and a “complete policy shift” to return to former President Donald Trump’s “maximum” economic pressure on the Iranian regime.
In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News on Friday, Waltz, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House Armed Services Committee, and House Foreign Affairs Committee, addressed the U.S. military’s recent announcement that three American troops were killed and 25 injured in a drone attack in Jordan.
“Three American service members are dead and dozens injured, and now the Biden administration is deliberately telegraphing to Iran what their response will be — eliminating any element of surprise,” he said, referring to Biden’s announcement of his decision on a response to the strike Tuesday, which included his reassurance he does not seek a “wider war in the Middle East.”
The Florida congressman, who served as a Special Forces commander in Afghanistan, expressed his fear that Biden is “once again trying to check the box with meaningless strikes that target warehouses rather than punish the Iran regime.”
According to Waltz, who is a colonel in the National Guard as well as a former White House and Pentagon policy adviser and the first Green Beret to be elected to Congress, “not only does this require a strong military response but also a complete policy shift back to the Trump maximum pressure on Iran’s economy.”
In 2022, former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence accused the Biden administration of threatening to “unravel all the progress” the Trump administration made in marginalizing the Iranian regime, including abandoning the Iran nuclear deal and imposing tough sanctions on the theocracy’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which aims to protect the country’s Islamic republic political system.
The Trump administration also “vigorously enforced those sanctions to bring Iran’s oil exports to near zero during our administration and deny the regime its principal source of revenue,” he noted.
The matter comes as Republicans blame Biden for the deaths of the three U.S. troops killed in the drone strike in Jordan linked to Iran, pointing to the president’s continued “weakness” and appeasement strategy toward the authoritarian regime, which is the largest state sponsor of terrorism worldwide.
The attack on the military base in northeast Jordan, close to the Syrian border, marked the first U.S. troop casualties over a series of attacks on American forces by Iranian-aligned groups since the Israel-Hamas conflict began in October.
Elmurod Usubaliev/Anadolu via Getty Images
Following Taliban mass celebrations marking the second anniversary of the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, Waltz accused the Biden administration of having caved to “terrorists” and taken no accountability for the ensuing disaster.
In November, he blamed Biden’s “failed Iran policy” for the current conflict in Gaza as he called to “starve [Tehran] of the funds that it’s using to fund terrorism” and warned that terrorism on American soil is “only a matter of time… as long as this border is wide open.”
In addition, he insisted that every time Biden lectures Israel, he is signaling that Hamas’s propaganda is “working.”
