Vice President JD Vance took a shot at critics of the White House’s peace negotiations with Iran, saying many of those objecting are the same people who pushed the United States to “just drop a few more bombs in places like Afghanistan” during the global war on terror.
Vance made the remarks while addressing U.S. military personnel at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia on Wednesday. In particular, Vance said that President Donald Trump launched the Iran war with the objectives of destroying Tehran’s nuclear capabilities, military, and defense industrial base. The vice president said those objectives had been accomplished and now Trump was using the leverage provided by the U.S. military to negotiate an end to the conflict.
“He’s negotiating from a position where Iran’s nuclear program has been destroyed and their conventional military has been destroyed too, and what I notice about the people who are attacking the administration for negotiating is that they’re the very same people who, for example, encouraged us to just go a little bit further and just drop a few more bombs in places like Afghanistan,” Vance said.
The vice president also used the speech to draw a contrast between the conflict with Iran and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush era.
“Why do we engage in negotiation? Because of you, it’s not out of weakness, but it’s out of strength,” Vance said. “I go back to that time that I served in the United States military from ’03 to ’07, we made a lot of mistakes back then. We did a lot of stupid things back then. You performed ably, but your political leadership did not. And what I remember about that time is that number one, there were people who learned all the wrong lessons from that moment in history.”
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Vance said some of those lessons were that either the president “could never use the military again” or an “equally wrong lesson that the solution” was to ask the military to do “more and more and more without giving you a clearly defined objective.”
“I think that you deserve to have a clearly defined objective,” Vance said. “I think you deserve to have a president of the United States who believes in you and gives you the weapons to win, and I believe that you have presidential leadership today that will never ask you to go to war unless he’s telling you why you’re going to war.”