‘My fellow servicemen and women’s blood on [regime’s] hands’

OPINION:

Congratulations to the National Council of Resistance of Iran and the Iranian American community of Arizona. I join you here from Arizona. For my background, I served 26 years in our Air Force. I deployed six times to the Middle East and Afghanistan. I was a fighter pilot, and the first woman in U.S. history to fly in combat and command a fighter squadron in combat.

So, I say today, we are with you. The freedom-loving people of Iran, we are with you, we stand with you. God created us all with a desire to be free, and I’m so grateful for all you do to stand up for the Iranian people and their God-given freedoms. I’m also grateful for your focus on equal participation of women in the political, social, and economic future of Iran. It’s time for the Iranian people to be able to have their own voice, to be able to govern themselves, and to have fundamental human rights and freedoms. The regime is the largest state sponsor of terror, and has the blood of my fellow servicemen and women on their hands through their proxy forces in Iraq. You know their nuclear ambitions and ballistic missiles and malevolence in the region, and the dangerous nature that they are in the world. But, also, their authoritarian regime and the crackdown that it’s had on human rights for the Iranian people, and the imprisonment and the death of so many brave Iranians who have been standing up for their own basic freedoms and rights that everybody deserves.

I agreed with pulling out of the awful deal and the maximum pressure campaign that President Trump and his administration have been putting on Iran. We have shown that it’s working. It’s squeezing off their cash. They need cash in order to continue to have repression and oppression against the Iranian people and funding their terrorist activities and proxy wars around the region.

We must continue in a unified way with our European partners to support the maximum pressure campaign. We have some European partners here today, we need you to stand with us and with the Iranian people. There needs not to be a wedge between us. We need to be unified on the snapback of sanctions, and also to ensure that the arms embargo continues into the future.

There are many actions in the United States Senate that I’m supporting, and many others are supporting on both sides of the aisle, to stand with the brave Iranian people. At least 1,500 were killed in these last protests, likely more. So many more imprisoned. You are putting everything on the line for your God-given freedoms. God bless you all, our prayers are with you, and we stand with you that you will be free.