Sitting inside his Senate office late Wednesday afternoon, Montana senator Tim Sheehy holds up his arm to show me the silver memorial bracelets he wears as a daily reminder of the friends he lost in Iraq, killed by radical Shiite forces that are funded and directed by the Iranian regime.
“This guy was cut in half” by an Iranian explosively formed penetrator, he tells me, pointing to a bracelet commemorating fallen soldier Benjamin Tiffner, an Army Special Forces captain killed in action in Baghdad in 2007. Sheehy was one of the service members who carried Tiffner’s body off of a plane at Dover Air Force Base. “I buried him in Arlington.”
This is Sheehy’s reaction to my question on the administration’s suggestion that Iran’s leaders have turned over a new leaf and are less radical than their predecessors—who were killed in the war by Israel and the U.S. At the G7 summit earlier this month, Donald Trump said, “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with. . . . They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”
“I hope they’re correct,” Sheehy tells me in an interview on Wednesday afternoon in his Senate office while drinking his beer of choice, a Coors Banquet. But he wants to remind the administration that the Iranian regime hasn’t crossed an ideological Rubicon simply because its former leaders were whacked. This is a regime that wants us to “die in brutal, disgusting ways” and wants “to videotape us being raped and burned alive.”
