On Tuesday’s “CNN News Central,” House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) stated that while he doesn’t know all the particulars of the strike on an Iranian embassy compound in Syria, “if Iran wants to stop this sort of thing, they need to stop advocating for the elimination of Israel.” And it’s crucial to keep the conflict in the Middle East from spreading.
Smith said Iran’s attempts to blame the United States for the strike are absurd because “They’ve been in a conflict with Israel. They’ve been funding Hezbollah, they’ve been funding Hamas, they’ve been funding a variety of different threats and attacks on Israel for quite some time now. They know they’re in that conflict. It’s not driven by the United States, it’s driven by the fact that Iran has made it very clear that they want to wipe Israel off the map, and Israel is defending itself against that attack. Now, this specific strike, I don’t know the ins and outs of why Israel felt like this was an appropriate strike to take in that conflict. But if Iran wants to stop this sort of thing, they need to stop advocating for the elimination of Israel. But the U.S. has no responsibility for this. This is Israel and Iran in a conflict that I think we’re all very painfully aware of.”
He continued, “But the big concern here is the spread of the conflict. It’s something that we’ve been trying to contain since October 7, with the rockets and the weapons that Hezbollah has just up to the north in Lebanon and what Iran has been shipping across Syria for some time, there’s a real risk of this spreading into a larger conflict that engulfs the entire Middle East. So, we have to keep working to try and contain that in any way we can.”
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