Tom Cotton: The Nation's Very Worst Veteran

The next time you see a politician’s lawn sign or hear a politician’s voice, saying, “Vote for a Vet,” you need to remember two things:

First, there are good veterans and there are bad veterans. The bad ones go all the way back to Benedict Arnold, a Revolutionary War turncoat whose name has become a handy shorthand for traitor. In more modern times, bad vets include Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated John F. Kennedy, preventing the president from pulling American troops out of Vietnam, as he had planned, a murderous act that led to 58,000 American deaths in that war; Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber; and Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer. That names a few.

Second, remember this: Probably the worst, most dangerous vet currently occupying a seat in the United States Congress is Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas. His latest bit of warmongering is a threat to the International Criminal Court, which has been investigating the way Israel is pursuing its war in Gaza. "Target Israel and we will target you," reads the letter, leaving zero doubt that he would love to make life difficult for the Court. Cotton not only signed it, but led in putting that threatening letter together, signed by 11 other senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

At a time when calmer voices are expressing something approaching alarm about the dangers of a possible wider war in the Middle East... Cotton has predictably thrown caution to the winds.

And this wasn't the first time that Cotton has led senators far senior to himself in seeking confrontation. Years ago, when President Barack Obama was negotiating a deal with Iran about nuclear weapons, Cotton intervened by putting together a letter to the Iranian mullahs, essentially warning them off the deal. In the Senate, an institution where seniority is everything, how did the youngest senator—at age 37 and with only two months of seniority—manage to persuade 46 other senators, with a total of 4,775 months of seniority (390 years), to join him in this bold venture? Was it the power of his intellect and his Harvard degrees? Was it his status as a combat veteran? Or was it the incipient aura of some future presidential candidacy?

None of this should come as a surprise, because Cotton clearly announced his fierce ideology in his maiden speech in the Senate. Cotton’s intense demeanor and appearance, right out of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (“Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look”) was fully on display from that moment on. He delivered that maiden speech on March 15, 2015—a date that brings to mind another Julius Caesar reference, “Beware the Ides of March.” It was a grim piece of our-enemies-are-coming-for-us rhetoric, painting a dark picture of America’s “retreat” and declining status in the world, raising concern about increasing threats from Russia and China and a list of other nations. To react to those threats, Cotton set out national goals of “global military dominance” and “hegemonic strength,” and he made absolutely clear where he stood on defense spending: America needs more—a lot more.

Cotton built the career leading to that speech with an impeccable academic and military resume. He earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, followed by a law degree from Harvard Law School. He has also checked the warrior box: After 9/11, he left the practice of law and spent nearly five years as an infantry officer, including deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. His time in combat boots does not appear to have soured him on war. That consistent bellicosity, plus his proven knack for making headlines, makes him especially scary. “He is my least favorite congressional veteran, maybe in history,” said Danny Sjursen, a former army major who also saw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, taught history at West Point, and became as staunchly antiwar as Cotton is pro-war. “I mean, he’s that bad.”

As his leadership in that letter to Iran's mullahs demonstrates, the Arkansas Republican has had a fixation on Iran from his first moments in the Senate. Now, at a time when calmer voices are expressing something approaching alarm about the dangers of a possible wider war in the Middle East, and Iran gets mentioned often as a backer of terrorists, Cotton has predictably thrown caution to the winds. He has fired volleys of criticism at President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for being soft on Iran. Soft, of course, is a beloved word of Republican politicians. They emerge from the birth canal yelling, “You’re soft on national security,” or “You’re soft on crime.” Cotton is no exception.

The Iran letter was not the only time Cotton made headlines. In 2020, after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck until he died, protests broke out around the nation and the world. To Cotton and others, the sporadic violence arising from those protests was serious business. Cotton had long ago made clear his views on the issue of race relations. During his Harvard days, he had written a review of a book about race for the conservative Harvard Salient. Cotton claimed to have seen real progress on the issue of race, and all America really needed to do was to just quit talking about it so much. “If race relations are better now than at any time in our history and would almost certainly improve if we stopped emphasizing race in our public life, what would the self-appointed ‘civil rights leaders’ have to do with themselves? For this reason, they continue to make hysterical and wholly unsubstantiated claims that inflame public opinion and create a gnawing cynicism in the American people.”

His attack on the International Criminal Court, which is trying to investigate whether Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, is terrifying.

Suddenly, in 2020, that progress seemed to have ground to a halt with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. So Cotton weighed in loudly with an immediately controversial op-ed in the New York Times about the looting and violence that had broken out at a limited number of the protests. “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants,” Cotton wrote. “But the rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd, whose bereaved relatives have condemned violence. On the contrary, nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.” His solution: Invoke the Insurrection Act and call in the military.

Cotton’s op-ed, under the headline that the Times chose, “Send in the Troops,” caused an immediate uproar inside the Times. Dozens of staffers complained, many of them tweeting this line: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” It didn’t take long for the paper’s leadership to issue an unusually earnest apology for not vetting the piece more carefully: “After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.” In the uproar, the paper’s opinion editor, James Bennet, acknowledged that he had not even read Cotton’s op-ed during the editing process and admitted that it was the Times that had invited the senator to write the piece. A few days after the op-ed ran, Bennet resigned from his senior position at perhaps the most powerful newspaper in the country. Cotton clearly has the power to shake things up.

At a time when the United States needs to be careful and clear-headed about how it responds to the Middle East crisis, Cotton’s cheerleading for devastating military action against Iran is deeply unhelpful. His attack on the International Criminal Court, which is trying to investigate whether Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, is terrifying. He is someone to be watched carefully, as Julius Caesar felt about Cassius. “He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”