The Veterans Take on Juan Ciscomani Over His Spineless Support of the Iran War

(Photo credit, Adrian Fontes Facebook Page: left to right, US Sen. Mark Kelly, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, and Joanna Mendoza)

US Sen. Mark Kelly, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Sixth Congressional District candidate JoAnna Mendoza, a former Navy pilot, Marine officer, and Marine senior sergeant, respectively, took the stage on August 22 at the LaRosa performance area in Tucson for a Veterans Town Hall, where they could address the many issues vets have with the current Administration.

They began by speaking personally about their military experiences, including what having served meant to each of them. And then the moderator, Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, lobbed a grenade into the midst of the conversation. She recounted how Mendoza’s opponent, sitting Congressman Juan Ciscomani, had, when President Trump ordered up the Iran War, supported its start as a good thing which would free the Iranian people from the country’s oppressive theocratic rule, and who voted five times against allowing Congress to have War Powers oversight, even as chances of success diminished.

The mayor asked Mendoza if she were representing the district right now, would she have done the same. Mendoza answered in her best drill-sergeant-ish voice, “HELL, NO.”

And the attack on Ciscomani was on. Kelly, a former fighter pilot (and later an astronaut), described the Sixth District Congressman as “Donald Trump’s guy in the House of Representatives. He’s just a sycophant for the President.” When it came to attacking Iran “Juan Ciscomani should have stood up to him, and he did not.”

Mendoza said she is challenging Ciscomani to put together a bipartisan House commission to examine the conduct of the war (which he most certainly will not). Veterans and every other citizen deserve an accounting of what is devolving into a fiasco. Mendoza said that when elected, that would be her “first priority.”

As the war stands now, sixth months long and more than five months longer than Trump claimed it would last, US forces have accomplished little. American service members are dead, over $50 billion has been spent, and the US has not improved the lives of either its citizens nor Iranians. Unbelievably, the massive bombing campaign against Iran has led to a shortage of missiles and bombs. Just Thursday the Associated Press quoted a US defense official in Europe who said the stock of Patriot missiles, which can intercept Russian ballistic missiles, was so low between our forces in Europe and our NATO allies that “in the event of a Russian ballistic missile assault on, for example, a military headquarters or power plant, NATO could be in a similar position to Patriot-starved Ukraine and be forced ‘to take punch after punch in the mouth’.”

Ciscomani’s fervent desire to free Iranians from their government’s repression remains unfulfilled. Military Spend, a defense economics research website, estimates that as many as 3,700 civilians have been killed in attacks by our warplanes and missiles and those of our Israeli allies. Those are the folks we were supposed to be setting free. Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Ciscomani have ended up increasing the repression, not creating freedom.

This, Mendoza asserted, means American voters must “elect leaders who understand there is a human cost for this.”

Voter sentiment in the approaching election is tied closely to its effects at home, including the price of gasoline due to our air attacks closing of the Strait of Hormuz off the Iranian shore. Ordinarily about 140 oil tankers and cargo ships pass through the Strait every day. On Friday, that number was 11. Regular gas was selling at $4.32 a gallon in Pima County, almost 50 percent more than when the bombing began. Diesel prices, used by trucks delivering everything from food to clothing to lumber, have risen 62 percent since the start of Trump’s ignorant war, causing more economic pain across the US.

The Associated Press zeroed in on that issue in another Thursday story, quoting a Pennsylvania man who sat out the 2024 election, but says now, “the price of gas affects the price of everything and the price of everything’s up and my pay hasn’t gone up…I’m going blue no matter who this time.”

In Arizona’s Sixth, it isn’t “no matter who,” but a chance to vote for JoAnna Mendoza, the career Marine who knows the cost of war, and sees her mission as a member of Congress as doing more than just supinely support a reckless president. She recently accused Ciscomani of being “spineless” in the face of Trump’s depredations. Marines have ramrod stiff spines.