On Tuesday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) stated that because Iran was building ballistic missiles “faster than we could manufacture our defensive capabilities,” “they would have been able to basically say, well, we’re done with the nuclear negotiations, we’re just going to do it, but, oh, by the way, with our ballistic missile capabilities, nobody’s going to dare challenge us, because we can wreak real havoc in the region, and we were getting close to that point.”
Co-host Joe Mathieu asked, “Senator, the president said today that he believed Iran was about to attack the United States. Have you seen evidence to support that? Do you believe that imminent risk was there?”
Rounds answered, “There [were] a couple of things there: First of all, based upon the information that we’ve received so far, it was very clear that they were, number one, not dealing in good faith with us on the diplomatic side. We know that. And they were delaying. And, in the meantime, they were building short-range and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and they were getting to the point, because they were manufacturing them faster than we could manufacture our defensive capabilities, and, at some stage in the very near future, they would have been able to basically say, well, we’re done with the nuclear negotiations, we’re just going to do it, but, oh, by the way, with our ballistic missile capabilities, nobody’s going to dare challenge us, because we can wreak real havoc in the region, and we were getting close to that point. In the meantime, this was a time in which we’d already taken out a lot of their defensive capabilities earlier, and this provided us with a little bit more of a time-sensitive time period, in which, if we were going to actually handle the situation before they got to the point where we could not handle it, it was a very limited window.”
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