Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Sunday that U.S. attacks on Iran were illegal and that he would not have approved them during ongoing negotiations.
“It is clear that this is illegal,” the senator said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
He has said that only Congress can declare war and that the attack came while the United States and Iran were working on a peaceful solution to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear development.
“We were at the negotiating table trying to come to a diplomatic agreement,” Murphy said. “No, I would not have authorized strikes literally at the moment that we were sitting down with the Iranians trying to come to a peaceful settlement. The only way that you are going to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is an agreement.”
Jewish American leaders, Israeli officials and others have said that the strikes were justified and necessary and that they make the world safer broadly, not just for Israel and for the United States.
Murphy disagreed with the president’s assessment that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were “obliterated.”
“The International Atomic Energy Commission just confirmed that we only set back their program by a handful of months,” Murphy said. “As open reporting has suggested, these strikes did not destroy all of their enriched uranium. It did not destroy all of their centrifuges, and it certainly didn’t destroy their knowledge.”
“It stands to reason that they can reconstitute their nuclear program within months,” he said.
That proved a negotiated outcome was the only solution, according to Murphy. “What are we going to do?” he said. “We’re going to carry out these massive $100 million strikes every three or four months? No, you need a diplomatic agreement.”
U.S. and Israeli government sources and experts who have followed the attacks note that the assessment that Iran was only set back a matter of months was a conclusion drawn early on and with low confidence.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a part of the anti-Israel far left “Squad” in Congress, said after the attack on Iran that Trump’s decision to launch the strikes without first going to Congress was “absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.”
Murphy wouldn’t endorse that call. He said that any such action would have to start in the House, not the Senate.
He did note that while Trump was impeached twice during his first term, “if you compare his conduct in this administration to the conduct that he got impeached for in the first administration, his conduct in this administration is much worse, much more lawless and much more unconstitutional.”
David Friedman, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, responded to Murphy on social media and called the senator’s remarks “truly pathetic.”
“For four years, you supported the rebirth of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the financing of its terror proxies, through sanctions waivers and failed diplomacy,” Friedman wrote.
“Your party brought Iran to the very brink of a nuclear weapon,” he stated. “You watched, without comment, while Biden did everything but send Tehran a nuclear warhead, and now, for no reason other than partisan politics and perhaps a run for the White House, you and CNN concoct some artifice to make America’s victory look like a loss.”