WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump held a Cabinet meeting on Thursday to tout progress in the Iran war, Sen. Mark Warner dismantled the administration's entire strategy brick by brick.
The Virginia Democrat, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, rattled off a damning list of unmet war goals to Raw Story: no regime change, no elimination of enriched uranium, no meaningful degradation of Iran's missile and drone capability, and no reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
"None of that's happened," Warner said flatly.
While Trump has expressed surprise at the breadth of Iran's response, Warner rejected any notion that the administration could have been caught flat-footed by Iran's decision to close the strait.
"No!" he replied, in response to Raw Story's question, calling Iran's response blindingly obvious to anyone who had read the intelligence.
"Why do you think somebody else hasn't done this before, including Trump one?" he asked, rhetorically. "Because it's obvious they would close the strait, obvious they would hit all the Gulf nations adjacent, and if you were planning this, this is the part that I'm terrified about right now, that we are exhausting our number of interceptors."
The economic fallout, Warner argued, has been catastrophic: $6 diesel for trucks, fertilizer up 40%, aluminum at record highs, and Asian economies shutting down one day a week to cope with $150 oil. All of this, he warned, will hit American consumers.
Warner also torched the administration's military economics, noting the U.S. is spending $2.4 million per interceptor missile to knock down $50,000 drones after Trump rejected Ukrainian drone technology capable of doing the same job for under $50.
He reserved his sharpest words for top intelligence officials who claimed only the president can determine what constitutes an imminent threat.
"That is totally bonkers," Warner said.