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Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am glad to be on the floor--sixth, seventh, eighth week in a row; I have lost count--this week to support Senator Merkley's resolution to end the war in Iran.

It is simple: This is a war that is making America less safe. It is a war that is costing the people of this country billions of dollars. It has resulted in untold numbers of civilian deaths in the region. The entire world economy is spiraling out of control. Prices for gas are through the roof--$6 a gallon in many parts of the country--and the cost of everything is going to go up very quickly.

But in my short remarks today, I really want to take the administration's war goals at face value and, 74 days into this conflict, assess whether we are closer to meeting those goals or further away.

Secretary Hegseth was before the Appropriations Committee today, and we really got very little information from him as to whether this essential question--the meeting of war goals--is answerable. Let me try to answer it.

The first thing that the administration said they wanted to do was to annihilate Iran's navy. Well, they have essentially destroyed Iran's conventional navy, but they have not destroyed Iran's fleet of speedboats and so-called suicide skiffs that effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, and it goes without saying that that feat is impossible. The administration will never be able to eliminate all of Iran's small speedboats that drop mines in the strait or threaten to drop mines in the strait and these suicide skiffs, which run these suicide missions at tankers and boats in the strait. So as long as that fleet of small boats is able to harass traffic in the strait, effectively close down the strait, you have not annihilated Iran's navy, and you will never annihilate Iran's navy. So you can claim that you sunk some big boats, but it is the small boats that have closed the Strait of Hormuz and created a global catastrophe.

The second goal that the administration states is to destroy Iran's ballistic missiles. Now, Trump recently claimed that Iran only has 18 to 19 percent of their ballistic missiles left, but according to public reporting, a CIA assessment has found that Iran actually retains 70 percent of its missiles. So we have expended tens of billions of dollars, we have dramatically depleted our munitions stores, and Iran still has 70 percent of its missiles. That same public reporting suggests that Iran is already starting to dig out from the damage we did and rebuild some of the launchers and the missiles that we damaged.

Similarly, another war aim was to destroy their drone fleet. The CIA assessment says Iran still has 70 percent of its drones. Realistically, drones are so easy to manufacture, there was never going to be a way through an air campaign alone for us to be able to eliminate their drone capacity. It is another reason the strait is closed.

There is no military mechanism available to the United States to open the strait because we cannot find all of their small speedboats, we cannot find all of their drones.

So 74 days of war and billions of dollars spent, over a dozen Americans killed, and Iran still has their drone fleet.

The last goal--and the President has doubled down on this goal--is to stop Iran from ever being able to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Now, we know for sure you can't actually achieve that goal through military action--not without regime change, not without U.S. boots on the ground. The administration has said we are not going for regime change. They seem very comfortable with the new regime, which is, by all accounts, more radical and more dangerous than the regime that they displaced. While Trump still keeps open the possibility of putting boots on the ground, as of today, it doesn't appear that there are going to be hundreds of thousands of American troops going into Iran to take their enriched uranium and their fissile material.

So the only way that you are going to effectuate this goal--stopping Iran from being able to acquire a nuclear weapon--is by taking the same path that we were pursuing under President Obama--a diplomatic path. So the question then is just: Are you going to get a better diplomatic deal today than you got when President Obama was in office? And all the evidence suggests that you are going to get a much worse deal today than you got when President Obama pursued this same path--for two reasons.

First, Iran has much more leverage today. I heard Secretary Hegseth say today in our hearing that America has all the leverage. That is just made up because the facts on the ground are pretty simple.

In 2013, when President Obama was negotiating this deal with Iran, their economy was crippled, but Iran didn't control the Strait of Hormuz. Today, Iran's economy is crippled, but they control the Strait of Hormuz. They have more leverage today than they had in 2013. In 2013, we certainly held open the specter of a military attack, but now Iran has the leverage of knowing that it can survive the best punch that America can throw. After 74 days into the war, the regime is still standing. Their missile program still exists. Their drone program still exists. Their nuclear program still exists. They control the Strait of Hormuz. They have more leverage today than they did in 2013.

The second reason you are going to get a worse diplomatic deal is that the stakes are lower for Iran because, once Trump pulled out of the Obama agreement, Iran pressed fast-forward on their nuclear research program.

Before the Obama nuclear agreement, Iran was enriching to 20 percent. The nuclear agreement brought them down to 3 percent. Since Trump pulled us out of that agreement, Iran has gone from enriching 3 percent all the way up to 60 percent. And we all know that, once you are at 60 percent, it is really just a political decision to get to 90 percent, which is what you need for a bomb.

So Iran now has the knowledge, in perpetuity, to be able to very quickly get to enough nuclear material--enriched at a high enough level--to be able to make a bomb.

Maybe, in this agreement, they agree to go back to 3 percent or maybe they even agree to pause, for a period of time, enrichment. That is a different calculation for Iran today than it was in 2013 because they can easily make that agreement knowing that the minute they decide to rush to a bomb, they can get there much faster now because of Trump's decision to pull out of the agreement.

You are going to get a worse diplomatic deal under these circumstances than you got in 2013.

So I just share that with all of you because, even if you take their warnings at face value--and they seem to be changing by the week--they haven't achieved a single one of them, and there is no hope of their achieving those objectives even if they were to restart the war.

So why are we doing this? Why are we doing this if we can't achieve any of our objectives and if the price of the war is being paid for by American citizens and by American farmers?

I understand that the President is full of hubris and pride. I understand my Republican colleagues, in having backed this war, are having a hard time squaring reality with their stated position of supporting the war.

But it is OK to change your mind. It is OK to look at the facts on the ground, come to the conclusion that the war didn't go the way that the President promised you it would go, and join us and vote to end this war. I know that is difficult for any political figure who has made it all the way to the U.S. Senate to admit that they were wrong.

But my Republican colleagues were wrong. Nobody can come to the floor and make an argument that there is a path through the continuation of this war to eliminate their ballistic missile program or their drone program. I think it would be hard for folks to suggest that the longer this war goes on, the better a diplomatic agreement we are going to get.

So we are going to continue to come to the floor and ask for our colleagues to join us because, out there in the American public, this isn't much of a debate. People want this war to end. They cannot sustain the costs of this war any longer. I appreciate the work of my colleagues in continuing to bring these motions to the floor. This is our one and only opportunity to debate war.

Our Republican colleagues--74 days into this war--have still not brought a resolution before the Senate to authorize the war. That is in violation of the Constitution. Every single day, we as a body are in violation of the Constitution. So it is left to the Democrats to force this debate on a weekly basis, which we will continue to do until this war ends.

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