Dem Rep. to CNN: You Don’t Just Rush into Iraq Because Media Wants You To

Representative Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) tried to put the brakes on the American invasion of Iraq Sunday morning, which it seemed State of the Union host Candy Crowley was about to lead herself, arguing that the U.S. can’t just rush into combat operations because the media felt a sense of urgency.

“You just don’t rush in because the media is talking about it,” Ruppersberger said. “You don’t rush in because other countries aren’t going to tell us what to do. When we do it, we’ll have an endgame, we’re get it done. We will do what we have to do to protect us from ISIS.”

Ruppersberger’s comments were more in line with Representative Tom Cole’s (R-OK) on This Week — who said everybody needed to focus less on the immediacy of military action than its longterm wisdom — than they were with that hawkish House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI). He also disputed the notion that the Obama administration had “no strategy.”

“If we’re going to go in, we’re just not going to go in and drop some bombs,” Ruppersberger continued. “We’ll go in to stop them on a long-term basis. We have to learn from Iraq. In Iraq, military just doesn’t do it alone. We have to get other people. We have to get the Sunnis more active. What happened in Iraq and Maliki’s government pushing the Sunnis out caused a lot of this problem.”

Watch the clip below, via CNN:

[Image via screengrab]

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