Arizona veterans urge GOP to back War Powers Resolution, honor 13 Americans killed in Iran

Days after the U.S. Senate took a pivotal step that could end the war in Iran, Arizona veterans gathered at the state Capitol to urge Congressional Republicans to coalesce behind that effort. 

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate voted 50-47 to advance a War Powers Resolution that could block President Donald Trump from engaging in further military conflict against Iran without congressional approval. Several Republicans broke from their party to back the resolution, but it has yet to undergo a final vote, and it’s likely to be defeated in the GOP-controlled U.S. House of Representatives. 

Almost every Democrat in the upper chamber including Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, who are both veterans and have been vocally opposed to the war, voted in favor of moving the resolution forward. Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman voted against doing so.

More than a dozen former and current military members in Arizona called on GOP lawmakers to support the bid to end the war, and lamented the deaths that have already occurred. Since the war’s beginning in February, 13 American service members have died. Ricardo Reyes, a Marine Corp veteran and the executive director of Vets Forward, a progressive veterans advocacy group, denounced any effort to dismiss those deaths as inevitable and said elected officials should think twice about the potential human toll before agreeing to continue the war. 

“Today, we say to every elected leader in this country: Do not dare treat these lives like the price of doing business,” Reyes said. “Don’t dare ask more families to pay that cost without any answers. Don’t you dare send more sons and daughters into harm’s way because it’s easier to escalate rather than to lead with courage.” 

Derek Duba, an Army veteran and top staffer for Gallego, added that wars also affect the families and communities of military members and often harms their lives for years. 

“The truth is, in war, there are no unwounded soldiers,” he said. “And the friends, families and communities we return to, dead or alive, continue carrying the cost of it for generations to come. There is no ‘four to six week’ victory.”

Over the past three months, Trump has offered conflicting and vague estimates on how long the war would last, claiming multiple times in March that it would end after just a few weeks. 

On Wednesday, Trump said that he was “in no hurry” to make a deal that could end the conflict. Last week, the president said he wasn’t concerned about the economic toll the war he launched was having on Americans.

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situations. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters. 

State Rep. Aaron Marquez, D-Phoenix, a veteran who was deployed twice to Afghanistan and still serves in the Army Reserve, said that he’s hopeful more Republicans will buck their party to advance the resolution. He added that military conflict should be the last resort, but Trump jumped prematurely into the war at Israel’s prompting without seeking alternative solutions. 

“Going to war must be exhausting all diplomatic options,” he said. “We clearly did not exhaust all diplomatic options.”

Marquez added that a failure to rein in the Trump administration will be noticed by voters. 

The war has been widely unpopular. In a recent New York Times poll, 64% of people said they believed Trump made the wrong decision when he launched a military campaign against Iran. But that same survey found that respondents who identified as Republican overwhelmingly supported that decision. 

And that’s been reflected in at least one primary race. Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who vocally criticized the Iran War, lost his party’s nomination to a Trump-endorsed opponent. Massie also led the charge to force the release of the Epstein files, over Trump’s objection. Trump and convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein were close in the 1990s, and he is mentioned more than 38,000 times in the files that have been released so far.

To memorialize the 13 Americans who have been killed so far in the Iran War, the group paused to observe a moment of silence and then each member took turns reading their names, their military rank and a short biography. 

Thomas Solnit, a Marine Corp veteran, read the name of 42-year-old Noah L. Tietjens, who served as a vehicle mechanic. Tietjens was killed along with five others in a strike in Kuwait and left behind a wife and a teenage son. 

“Today we honor his life and his years of commitment,” Solnit said. “We hold his family in our hearts and we say his name because he deserves to be remembered with dignity, not lost in the noise of war: Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens.”