Sen. Cotton tells Levin about his time contending with Soleimani's terror campaign against US troops

Sunday night on Fox News' "Life, Liberty & Levin," Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., called out his Democratic colleagues for their critical responses to the airstrike that killed Iranian general and terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani earlier this month.

"I was very disappointed at all my Democratic colleagues in the Senate, I've got to say, over the last few weeks," Cotton told LevinTV host Mark Levin. "Because if you've got a chance to take a mastermind like Qassem Soleimani off the battlefield, you take it, and I commend the president for doing so. We should have done it a long time ago."

Cotton told Levin that he has seen intelligence saying that Soleimani was indeed "plotting something large, something very dangerous."

"The question of whether an attack is imminent or not, Mark, I've got to say, looks very different if you're a soldier sitting in Iraq than if you're some comfortable senator sitting behind armed guards in Washington, D.C.," Cotton said.

And Cotton would know. His experience in dealing with Iran's campaign of violence against American troops goes back over a decade to his deployment as an infantry officer in the Iraq war, he explained.

"We saw sectarian warfare almost every single day in Baghdad, fueled in no small part by Iranian meddling," Cotton said, adding that "the most deadly weapon we faced was a particularly sophisticated kind of roadside bomb that was manufactured in Iran by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard QUDS force, led by Qassem Soleimani, who has the blood of hundreds of American soldiers on his hands because of that meddling in the Iraq war."

"So my history with Iran goes very far back," Cotton said.

When asked what the justification is for not simply getting out of the Middle East as a whole, Cotton said that Iran has "been waging war against us for 40 years, and we cannot allow Iran to wage a proxy war against us without fighting back. He said that he would like to see a smaller U.S. presence in Iraq, "but also a stable country in which you don't see a vicious terrorist organization like the Islamic State rise from the ashes and start threatening Americans again."

WATCH:

Disclosure: The author of this story is taking a graduate school course taught by Sen. Cotton this semester; his reporting is his own.

Don’t miss an episode of LevinTV! Sign up now.