Ciscomani Had Two Chances to Vote for Iran War Sanity—He Failed Them Both

We’ve said it before, he gets an “F” in foreign affairs. But so does HIS Supreme Leader.

Rep. Juan Ciscomani cast two votes in the House of Representatives last week on the war in Iran, becoming known widely as “Donald Trump’s War.” As has often been the case, Ciscomani got both votes wrong.

            On Wednesday he lined up with almost all his Republican colleagues to pass a budget bill that would spend $73 billion more on the war. Two GOP members saw the light and joined all the Democratic members in opposition. The bill passed by a slim two-vote margin.

            Then on Thursday Ciscomani and most of those GOPers voted against a Democratic resolution to invoke the War Powers Act. This time some more Republicans broke ranks and the bill passed by six votes. The War Powers Act is a statute that gives Congress some power over an overseas war in which the US is involved.

This current war was begun by Trump and is coming to the end of its fifth month with no end in sight. When the US and Israel’s armed forces began bombing Iran on February 28, the president predicted that, due to the power of the two militaries, the war would only last a few weeks. At the beginning of May, although a “few weeks” had already gone by, Juan Ciscomani, a dependable parrot for the administration, said the war should be over very soon..

Both knew little about Iran, although even a little knowledge of Middle Eastern history and geography could have served them well. Iran, a strong theocracy with a leadership more disposed to killing protesting citizens than listening to them, has held the line in a war in which it ought to be vastly outgunned by drawing a line of airborne firepower across the narrow Strait of Hormuz off its shore. An enormous amount of shipping from the Persian Gulf, including crude oil and natural gas needed elsewhere in the world, needs to pass through the Strait. Before the war, about 130 ships sailed through the Strait each day. On July 27, the total was six.

And the Iran War is in danger of becoming a wider Middle East war. Oil producing countries are naturally looking for ways to avoid the Strait. Saudi Arabia has a port on the Red Sea to the west. But that puts its ships in the range of missiles from the rebel Houthis in Yemen, who get their munitions and directions from Iran. The Houthis have zeroed in on ships in the Red Sea, and now, “Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi militants fired on Saudi oil installations ​in two ports on the Red Sea coast on Saturday,”

“There is an escalatory dynamic now,” according to a former US diplomat with Iran experience, “I don’t think the United States administration really has a clear strategic concept of what it is trying to do.”

Foreign policy expert Daniel W. Drezner has created the graphic below to illustrate his argument that there were multiple reasons given by Trump to go to war, and that almost none of them, maybe none at all, have been met.

There’s no sense going once more into detail about the damage this is causing to the US economy. Escalating prices for regular gasoline and the underlying inflationary cost of food and other items driven by the cost of diesel fuel used by delivery trucks are well known. So well-known in fact, that national polling from June 1 through last week showed Trump with a whopping average 22.7 percent negative rating on Iran.

As for Ciscomani, he doesn’t figure in Iran polls, just in the opinions of his constituents. He hides from his constituents, with no public meetings. Jim O’Brien, an Oro Valley resident, wrote to the congressman a month ago, seeking his opinion on the war and other major issues. Here is part of O’Brien’s letter to the editor of the Arizona Daily Star last Saturday: “Response? None. Juan prefers Happy Talk. He enjoys great PR with his local folks, smiling faces all. ‘What me worry?’”

Ciscomani should worry a lot, though. Contrast his mealy-mouthed non-responses with his hard-charging November opponent, JoAnna Mendoza: “She believes we must exhaust diplomatic options before putting American lives at risk. After 20 years of war in the Middle East, she is committed to ensuring we are not sending the next generation into endless conflicts without a clear mission, strategy, and path forward.”