Sen. Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that there’s “not a simple answer” as to who will lead Iran after the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a massive U.S.-Israeli military operation a day earlier.
“I don’t think anyone can give you a simple answer,” Cotton said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan. “There’s probably a lot of jockeying inside of Iran right now; they have a very consultative, deliberative process to replace the supreme leader. There’s a reason why he didn’t want to have a clear succession plan in place.”
The U.S. and Israel on Saturday launched a massive military operation inside Iran, which continued Sunday. Iranian state media said at least 200 people were killed in the country, while Iran launched retaliatory strikes on Israel and allies in the Middle East, killing at least six people in Israel and one in Abu Dhabi, and wounding dozens more.
Khamenei, 86, who had ruled Iran as supreme leader since 1989 and was only the second person ever to hold the role, was among those killed, President Trump said Saturday. The Israel Defense Forces said in a press conference Saturday that seven Iranian officials and commanders were killed, including Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to Khamenei.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in January that “I don’t think anyone can give you a simple answer as to what happens next in Iran if the Supreme Leader and the regime were to fall, other than the hope that there would be some ability to have somebody within their systems that you could work towards a similar transition.”
When asked about Rubio’s comments, Cotton on Sunday said Rubio is “right,” but added that he hoped there would be a situation similar to Venezuela, where Delcy Rodriguez was sworn in as president shortly after the U.S. captured then-President Nicolas Maduro.
Cotton said the U.S. will continue to strike Iran’s “military capabilities, and we’re going to continue to hit the senior leadership, the ayatollahs.”
But when pushed by Brennan to identify who the new leadership would be, Cotton answered by saying it should come from the “opposition,” who he defined as the “90 million Iranians who have suffered under the brutal Islamic Republic Revolutionary regime for the last 47 years.”
Cotton insisted there would be no “large-scale, ground force” inside of Iran, despite Mr. Trump saying on Saturday that there could be American casualties as part of the military operation.
“The president has no plan for any kind of large-scale, ground force inside of Iran,” Cotton told Brennan.
Cotton outlined that “one risk” of an “extended air and naval campaign” is that “an aircraft could be shot down, and the president would never leave a pilot behind. So no doubt we have combat search and rescue assets in the region that are prepared to go in and extract any downed pilot.”