Tom Cotton Swipes At Dana Bash Asking If The US Is ‘Repeating The Mistakes in Iraq with Venezuela’

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) swiped at CNN’s Dana Bash Sunday for equating the 2003 invasion of Iraq with the Trump administration’s successful removal of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro from power.

“We saw with Iraq what happens when you remove a dictator — Maduro definitely was a dictator, Saddam Hussein was a dictator — without a clear understanding of what comes next,” Bash said on Sunday’s State of the Union.

“And I don’t need to tell you, I mean, you won the Bronze star for your for your military service in Iraq,” Bash continued. “A number of your fellow combat veterans there — Senator [Ruben] Gallego, congressman Jason Crow, congressman Jake Auchincloss — they are saying that they’re deeply worried about the U.S. repeating the mistakes in Iraq with Venezuela.

Cotton denied the premise of Bash’s question.

“I think the analogy to the Iraq war is flawed. Latin America is not the Middle East. Venezuela is an —

“Some say Venezuela is more complicated,” Bash shot back.

“Well, no, it’s an ethnically, religiously, culturally homogenous country,” Cotton countered. “It does have a long history of stability and prosperity and working with America for decades before Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro ruined the country.”

Cotton then used the example of Panama as a “much more relevant precedent.”

“In 1989, George Bush sent more than 40,000 American troops into Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega, who was an indicted U.S. drug trafficker, and bring him back to the United States,” Cotton said. “Ever since, Panama has had a pro-American government. We’ve worked with them closely. They’ve been working with the Trump administration to minimize Chinese influence around the Panama Canal. I think that’s a much closer analog.”

Cotton declared Panama “a successful operation,” adding, “I believe in the long run, this will be, too. This will be — it has a chance to be truly revolutionary here in the Western Hemisphere by removing one of the biggest sources of instability and anti-American activism.”

President Donald Trump announced Saturday that the U.S. planned to govern Venezuela for the foreseeable future. Maduro, his wife and son, and two other co-defendants are set to stand trial in the Southern District of New York on narco-trafficking charges.

Watch the clip above via CNN.