PHOENIX, July 3 - Richard Grayson, Republican candidate for the U.S. House in Arizona's Fourth Congressional District, called a press conference this morning to attack incumbent Democratic Rep. Ed Pastor for supporting a resolution that demands that President Bush “initiate an international effort” to impose a land, sea, and air blockade on Iran to prevent it from importing gasoline and to inspect all cargo entering or leaving Iran.
"Such a blockade imposed without United Nations authority -- which the resolution does not call for -- could be widely construed as an act of war," Grayson told reporters. "This resolution reprises and magnifies the Bush administration’s longstanding sticks-and-saber-rattling- and-no-carrots approach to dealing with Iran -– an approach that is increasingly recognized even by senior U.S. intelligence and military officials as inadequate and unproductive."
"Worse still," Grayson continued, "Rep. Pastor's co-sponsorship of H. Con. Res. 362 risks reinforcing the most reckless tendencies of those in the Bush administration who have not yet given up on the idea of striking Iran militarily before leaving office."
"If a liberal Democrat like Ed Pastor is going to empower the hawkish neoconservatives who are just itching to attack Iran by giving them a blank check to go right ahead," Grayson said, "maybe he needs to be replaced with a common-sense Republican who will resist the march to a third war in the Middle East."
Grayson also quoted Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX):
This is unbelievable! This is closing down Iran. Where do we have this authority? Where do we get the moral authority? Where do we get the international legality for this? Where do we get the Constitutional authority for this? This is what we did for ten years before we went into Iraq. We starved children – 50,000 individuals it was admitted probably died because of the sanctions on the Iraqis. They were incapable at the time of attacking us. And all the propaganda that was given for our need to go into Iraq was not true.
The resolution is opposed by such groups as the Council for a Livable World, United for Peace & Justice, Code Pink and Just Foreign Policy.
Grayson is a state-certified write-in candidate running in the Sept. 2 AZ-04 Republican primary against Don Karg.
