‘They’re Following Netanyahu?!’ Senator Blasts Trump for Going Along With Israel’s ‘Dumb War’ 

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) was aghast at the rationale offered by the Trump administration for bombing Iran.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered their respective militaries to bomb Iran. The attacks killed dozens of top Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Hundreds of Iranian civilians were killed in the strikes, including at least 165 people – mostly children – at a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran. Six U.S. soldiers died in Kuwait in a retaliatory strike by an Iranian drone.

According to a report in The New York Times, Netanyahu was instrumental in convincing Trump to act.

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. started bombing Iran because the Trump administration knew Israel was about to strike, which might mean more U.S. casualties.

“[T]he president made the very wise decision, we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio told reporters. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) made similar comments about Trump’s decision.

Gallego, an Iraq war veteran, joined Monday’s All In on MS NOW, where he expressed disbelief and contempt at the dynamic. Earlier in the day, he tweeted, “I lost friends in Iraq to an illegal war. A young working-class kid should not pay the ultimate price for regime change and a war that hasn’t been explained or justified to the American people.”

“I was texting with a few different veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars today,” host Chris Hayes told Gallego. “And it’s been hitting people very hard just at an emotional level to watch this happen. And it seems like it is for you as well.”

“Look, I’m still living with the war,” Gallego replied. “It just frustrates me that we didn’t learn the lessons from 2003.”

The senator then focused his ire on Netanyahu, as well as Trump for getting dragged into a “dumb war”:

There’s a lot of things we could have done. And there was just such a rush to war. And we’re all paying for this. We’re all paying for this, whether it’s, we’re cutting Medicaid to pay for those bombs. We’re losing attention on the fact that this country right now is just suffering and trying to get anything to just breathe a little so they could just pay for their everyday goods: food, insurance, whatever the hell it is.

And what are our country leaders doing? They’re following Netanyahu?! Who has literally told us, he just told on TV that he’s been trying to do this for 47 years. I know. I suffered the first attempt at this in 2005, and now America is suffering again because of it. There’s a lot of ways that we could be supportive of Israel. There’s a lot of ways that we could defend Israel’s existence, it’s sovereignty. I’m 100% for that. But we don’t need to go to war for them, especially when it’s a dumb war.

Watch above via MS NOW.

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