The US House of Representatives is planning to vote on a new War Powers resolution that would limit President Trump's authority to take military action against Iran. The vote comes after the president authorized a strike that killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil last week. WGBH Morning Edition host Joe Mathieu spoke with Congressman Seth Moulton about the House's vote and his thoughts on the Trump Administration's briefing on Soleimani's killing. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.
Joe Mathieu: We have a lot to talk about this morning. I'd like to start with the vote today. It appears any resolution passed by the House would likely fail in the Senate. Do you believe that's the case, and are you worried the president could then use force without a check?
Rep. Seth Moulton: Well, absolutely, that's our concern. And there's bipartisan concern about this because the president clearly doesn't have a plan or a strategy. But more fundamentally, it's Congress's job to decide when, how and where we go to war. That's an authority we have vested in the Constitution. It's fair to say that administrations on both sides of the aisle have pushed the limit on that authority. It's time for Congress to do its job, and that's why we're having this vote today.
Mathieu: I'm going to guess, Congressman, based on your military experience and your view on foreign policy, that maybe you were not surprised to hear from Republicans like Mike Lee of Utah, who are not only dissatisfied with the briefing they received from the White House yesterday...Senator Lee even called it insulting. Do you believe there was an imminent attack?
Moulton: Well, I can't discuss the nature of classified intelligence, but let me just say this. Iran has been trying to attack American personnel in the Middle East for the last 15 years. So the question is, what's different now? And having read the detailed classified report, I think every American should see it. It'd be very simple for the administration to declassify it; they could just take out one detail and the whole thing would be unclassified. And every American needs to understand exactly what the imminent threat was and what it was not.
Mathieu: So how do you make that happen, Congressman? You're not the first to make that call. Can Speaker Pelosi work with you and others to make that public?
Moulton: Well, it's something that we brought up in the briefing yesterday with the director of the CIA and others and called on them to declassify documents. I think it's pretty obvious from what we're saying that we have a lot of skepticism and it's obviously felt on both sides of the aisle about the nature of this threat and whether the president's response was proportionate and smart. You know, the question that we always have to ask here is not just "Was this a bad man?" Of course Soleimani was a terrible, evil man with American blood on his hands. I fought Iranians and Iranian proxies on the ground in Iraq myself in 2004 — saw friends wounded, maimed [and] killed. But the question is, does it make us more safe? Does this create more problems than it solves? In fact, it reminds me of the situation I was in 2005 in Najaf, in southern Iraq, when General Petraeus sent me in a small team of Marines down to try to wrest the city back from militia control. We soon discovered that there was a Soleimani-type figure in charge. He was the governor of Najaf who was an Iranian proxy. He was a bad guy. And trust me, we wanted to kill him. But we made a strategic decision not to take him out because we knew that it would create more problems than it would solve. It would inspire more terrorists to join the cause than we were taking out ourselves. So that's the kind of calculus that has to go into these decisions and that's the kind of calculus that the administration obviously did not make before calling on this strike.
Mathieu: Some are suggesting that Iran intentionally tried to miss. I don't know if you're going there, Congressman, but the suggestion is they didn't want to cause American casualties and guarantee a U.S. military response. Does that sound real to you?
Moulton: It doesn't sound real based on the evidence that I've seen. I think I have every expectation that Iran will continue to retaliate, given how egregious this attack was from the from the perspective of proportionality. So in other words, if anyone thinks that Iran is done at this point, I think that that's incredibly naive. They've promised retaliation, they've done something initially, but they'll probably do more. I think it's also important to step back and just look at the strategic situation here. Iran and Soleimani in particular have been trying to influence Iraq for a long time and get the US out. Well, because of this strike, they're about to achieve our aims. Iraq just held a vote to force all American troops to withdraw. The irony is that just a couple of weeks ago, Iraqis were protesting the Iranian presence in Iraq, not the American presence. And back at home, Iranian citizens were rising up against the hardliners in the government, just like Soleimani. Well, the Trump Administration has managed to reverse all of those things in Iran's favor. So now Soleimani and his hardliners are being hailed as heroes, Iraq is trying to kick out America — not Iran — and we've had to stop our fight against ISIS because we're just taking a defensive posture in response to the Iranian promise of retaliation.
Mathieu: Congressman, you're going to be speaking about strategy and the way forward before the Atlantic Council think tank today in Washington, D.C. What is the next move to make here?
Moulton: Well, the most immediate thing we have to do is make a very clear path towards de-escalation. And I'll give credit where credit is due here, I was at least glad to see the Trump Administration back off a little bit yesterday and take the Iranian signal that we should de-escalate this conflict because frankly, it's not in our strategic interests to go to war with Iran. I don't see as any American, aside from perhaps Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who thinks it's a good idea to go to war with Iran. And if we get bogged down in another war on the Middle East, it takes our eye off the ball with other major national security threats around the globe, including the fight against ISIS to prevent terrorist attacks here at home and abroad that I just mentioned. So the second thing we have to do is we've got to get back on track with limiting their nuclear program. The administration says that they're trying to stop Iran's nuclear program, and yet Iran has done nothing but restart their nuclear program since the Trump Administration came to power and shredded the Iran nuclear deal. So we need to have a path forward on the Iran nuclear deal. And third, we've got to strengthen our presence in Iraq with the Iraqi government. I don't mean adding more troops. Not at all. We've got to strengthen our diplomatic presence to ensure that we have a base there to fight terror and to prevent attacks here at home. But the end goal here has to be to end endless wars in Middle East. That's actually a goal where I agree with the president. The problem is the president's doing the exact opposite. He's sending more troops to the Middle East, even as he's promised to end these wars and bring the troops home.
