Rep. DeFazio: Don't Attack Iran (Interview w/ Foreign Policy in Focus)

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Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) has been in Congress since 1986. In April 2006, he wrote a letter to President Bush to remind him that he must seek authorization from Congress before launching any preemptive attacks against Iran. He also introduced Resolution 391 to the same effect as well as a similar amendment to this year’s Defense Authorization Act (which was voted down). One year later, rumors of an upcoming U.S. military assault on Iran still abound, the latest from Russian intelligence that predicts a Good Friday attack. Here Rep. DeFazio talks of the congressional strategy to prevent a war with Iran.

Michael Shank: What difference is there, if any, in the way the president is rallying the American public and the U.S. Congress for a potential attack on Iran and the way he did so with Iraq?

Rep. Peter DeFazio: There’s been nowhere near the level of massive deception, phoneying up of intelligence, direct threats, talk about mushroom clouds and the unmanned aerial vehicles that were going to fly chemical and biological weapons into the interior of the United States. They haven’t done that.

We’re concerned that there’s an embedded plan, embedded in the minds of the same neo-cons who manufactured the war in Iraq, the same neo-cons who have been so wrong every step of the way about us being welcomed as liberators, about how Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction, about the size of the force necessary. They’ve been wrong about everything, but they still think they’re right.

It seems there is a group within the administration, perhaps led by Vice President Cheney, that wants to launch a preemptive or preventative or unilateral war against Iran. That’s why I’ve twice written to the president, getting members of Congress together to cosign. I’ve offered an amendment on the floor on this issue. We lost. All I was trying to do was restate the constitution. It’s very simple: that Congress and only Congress has the authority to initiate a war, a war that’s not a result of a direct attack on the United States or its armed forces.

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http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4120