Sen. Chris Murphy said the war in Iran is going “horribly” because it is being overseen by the “senile” 79-year-old Donald Trump.
The Connecticut Democrat, one of the most vocal opponents of the Middle East conflict, expressed his outrage after attending a classified briefing with Trump officials about the war earlier this week.
“This is the most incompetent, incoherent war America has fought in the last 100 years, and that’s saying a lot,” Murphy said, with his comments at the Capitol aired on CNN’s NewsNight on Thursday.
“This administration has no idea what they are doing. There is no viable war plan. They change their goals and their aims every single day,” Murphy added.
“I have great sympathy for our soldiers and our military leaders. They are being given directions by a senile old man who is losing his mind, so it’s no surprise that this war is going horribly.”
Trump has been widely condemned for dragging the U.S. into a new Middle East conflict with little justification and seemingly no clear plan for how it will end. The president, who has long faced scrutiny of his mental acuity, has made a number of erratic and misleading comments about the war since it began on Feb. 28.
Sources have also told CNN that the Pentagon and the National Security Council did not even bother planning for the possibility that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for any attacks. Iran’s closure of the vital shipping lane has triggered a global oil crisis, with prices once again topping $100 a barrel.
On Friday, U.S. Central Command confirmed that four of the six crew members of a KC-135 military refueling plane that crashed in western Iraq on Thursday had died, bringing the total number of U.S. military deaths since the war began to 11.
In a series of X posts earlier this week, Murphy suggested that the classified meetings attended by lawmakers are being held behind closed doors because “Trump can’t defend this war in public.”
“On the Strait of Hormuz, they had NO PLAN. I can’t go into more detail about how Iran gums up the Strait, but suffice it to say, right now they don’t know how to get it safely back open,” Murphy wrote. “Which is unforgivable, because this part of the disaster was 100 percent foreseeable.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
