Iran's parliament might have voted to retaliate on the world by closing down the "choke point" of the Straits of Hormuz for $1 billion of oil shipping daily, but Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., told Newsmax on Monday that the U.S. military assets will effectively veto that.
"Iran tends to be a little unstable when it comes to looking at the broader picture of things, because they are so focused on taking down the free world, if you will, as they perceive it," retired U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Bergman told "Wake Up America."
"And the Straits of Hormuz have always been a choke point. Our subsurface and our air assets are on station right now, and they're going to be utilized as necessary to ensure that the straits stay open."
Bergman, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and chair of the Intelligence and Special Operations Subcommittee, discredited talk from the left and even some anti-Trump Republicans saying Trump's strike on Iranian nuclear facilities required congressional approval.
"Over a 40-year period of time in uniform in the Marine Corps, whether it be here within our borders or somewhere else in the world, there were times that we executed missions over the blanket authority of higher headquarters without having to call home and ask for permission every time we sent a round down downrange," Bergman told co-hosts Marc Lotter and Sharla McBride.
"So my colleagues who talk about what we should have done probably haven't been in the fight when there's lives on the line and threat assessment having been done at the local level to secure the mission.
"Because, they did have authority to go ahead and do this because we don't want to have another 9/11 happen. That happened. That caught us by surprise. You should never be caught by surprise twice in the same regime."
As for Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., jumping on the "unconstitutional" strike talk to expand to impeachment, do not give them any "oxygen" for wasted breathlessness, Bergman said.
"Well, as my mother would have said, you got to consider the source," he said. "So if the source of calling for impeachment has no credibility, then you got to just kind of move on.
"So I'll just leave it at that, because we could dwell on what others say all the time, having no knowledge of threat assessment, having no knowledge of what it means to put together a national security posture, a strategy, and then execution of the strategy as necessary.
"So bottom line is, a little bit of oxygen was wasted by those words being said."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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