A MAGA congressman offered a muddled defense of President Donald Trump’s troop deployment to the Middle East by arguing that the presence of U.S. soldiers in Iranian territory wouldn’t really constitute “boots on the ground.”
The Pentagon has deployed warships carrying about 2,500 Marines as Trump’s attacks on Iran have ballooned to a wider regional conflict.
During an interview with CNN, Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas said he thought the troops would be used to secure Kharg Island, a strategic terminal about 15 miles off the Iranian coast that handles about 90 percent of the country’s crude oil exports.
Trump ordered strikes on military targets there over the weekend and is now considering trying to seize the island outright, sources told Axios.
“The island is not, in my opinion, boots on the ground in combat,” Sessions told CNN’s Kate Bolduan.
“How so?” Bolduan asked. “It is a territory of Iran.”
Sessions insisted that he thought Trump was sending in the troops to prevent Iran from destroying its own oil infrastructure.
“Is that boots on the ground? No, not like inside Iran where they’re in the cities,” he said. “Where we go through circumstances that we’ve had in the past of large areas of population combatants against us. And it is a mess. I am against the what I call the mass moving people, Marines, snipers into population areas.”
Bolduan then tried to clarify that Sessions was in fact in favor of “boots on the ground,” but not in large numbers.
The congressman pushed back that “boots on the ground” implied a situation such as U.S. deployments to Somalia, Iraq, or Afghanistan, which he tried to distinguish from Trump’s war in Iran.
“I’m talking about to secure this facility, the oil facilities, which are in everyone’s best interest,” he said. “I don’t think they’re facing enemy combatants when they secure oil facilities.”
Trump announced on Truth Social last week that he had attacked military targets on Kharg Island, but said he spared the oil infrastructure for “reasons of decency.”
“However, should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision,” he added.
Iran has retaliated against Trump’s strikes by strangling shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, causing global oil prices to spike.
On Monday, the president told reporters he was considering further attacks on Kharg Island.
