Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said Sunday that President Trump favors daily strikes on Iran, while urging the US to intensify pressure instead of halting attacks to give negotiations more room.
With the conflict nearing its sixth month, Kennedy argued that Washington needs to move quickly to achieve its military objectives, warning that the earlier pattern of daily attacks has failed to deliver results.
“The president likes the daily attacks. He believes that sometimes you have to kill a few chickens to scare the monkeys,” Kennedy said on “Meet the Press,” invoking the Chinese idiom.
“I don’t think that’s going to work with the Iranian leadership,” he continued. “These people are more than mildly insane. It’s like dealing with Son of Sam or Charles Manson.”
The US had carried out nearly two straight weeks of bombing in Iran after a memorandum of understanding collapsed earlier this month following Tehran’s attacks in the Strait of Hormuz.
Those strikes largely focused on Iranian military sites seen as threats to the strait. Iran responded with attacks on US military bases across the region, killing four additional American soldiers.
Trump has since put the airstrikes on hold in an effort to pursue diplomacy, though he has also warned of all-out war if Iran refuses to meet his demands.
Kennedy, however, maintained that diplomacy should take a back seat as long as Iran continues to preserve what he described as its terror infrastructure.
“I think we ought to tighten the sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil. I think we ought to continue the blockade and starve them out. I think we ought to bomb Pickaxe Mountain and try to reach what’s underneath it,” he said.
“I don’t think we ought to just cut and run,” Kennedy added. “If we can stand the pain of the rising cost of energy, we need to stay the course, at least for a few more months.”
Oil prices surged back to more than $100 per barrel last week after Iran’s repeated strikes in the Strait of Hormuz and its Houthi terror proxies threats in the Red Sea, both critical chokepoints that transport nearly a third of the world’s crude supply.
Prices fell below $97 per barrel after Trump ended the daily strikes on Friday and reports emerged that Pakistan was once again working to restart peace talks between Washington and Tehran.
The scope of the current talks remains unclear after Iran reportedly rejected a cease-fire offer on Thursday presented by Iraq’s prime minister on behalf of Trump.
