CNN Newsroom: Interview with Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT)

Interview

"Yes, I have as recently as yesterday when chairman and ranking members of the various security and foreign affairs committees gathered to hear about the White House's thinking on a supplemental.

As you probably know, Jim, the administration feels like in the very short term, they're just fine to be able to provide the Israelis with the weapons and the munitions that they need, but that is for the short term, and so Congress had a uniquely dysfunctional moment, needs to figure out how to get its act together for both that and for resupplying the Ukrainians.

But to answer your question directly, Jim, you know, if it didn't come through in the last interview, you know, the Israelis perhaps are moving a little more slowly than you might have anticipated given the brutality of the attack on their country for two related reasons. Number one, unlike Hamas, the IDF will operate pursuant to the laws of armed conflict and they have a brutal task in that regard because their enemy, Hamas, stores munitions in schools and mosques and hospitals, and urban warfare is brutal in the best of times, and this is far from that.

Secondarily, I can tell you, and this is the subject of much conversation between the United States and Israel, there's -- if the Israelis don't succeed in going after Hamas in a way consistent with the protection of civilians, that puts enormous pressure on Hezbollah to get into the fight, and a two-front war is obviously something that everybody would like to avoid here.

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Very much so. Every briefing I've gotten -- and of course President Biden's speech of two days ago made that point distinctly, and I know that the president in his many, many phone calls has reiterated the absolute necessity of the Israelis acting with humanity, acting with a notion of self-defense, and of eradicating a mortal threat to them rather than with a sense of revenge.

You know, we all had enormously emotional reactions to what we saw seven or eight days ago, including, by the way, the Israeli leadership. And so, you know, statements were made by senior Israeli ministers that I think, you know, as they get into the excruciatingly challenging thinking around conducting a military operation in an immensely, densely packed small area, you know, I think everybody is sort of being more prudent perhaps than they were when they were looking at just the God-awful bloody apocalypse that we all witnessed a week ago.

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Yes, I can't say much about that, Jim, and I would caution anybody from, you know, figuring out that they know whether the Egyptians warned, whether the U.S. warned, whether -- you know, how and why the Israelis were caught so much by surprise. There's a lot more smoke out there than there is fire.

I will tell you that, you know, intelligence is valuable when it's specific and actionable. In other words, that says, hey, we're seeing these tactical movements in this particular location. Be aware of that. And you don't need to be an intelligence professional to know that that kind of specific and actionable intelligence was not either gleaned by the Israelis or passed on to the Israelis by anybody else.

So the question of whether, you know, there might have been pieces saying that, you know, Hamas is getting itchy, in some ways, that's not really critical relative to the absolute importance of tactically actionable intelligence, which the Israelis did not get or have.

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Very much so, Jim. I mean, right behind making sure that Israel has the weapons and munitions that they need and making sure that we do everything we can to locate and get the hostages released, and I'm not even going to say behind, because these are not ranked priorities.

These are all critical, absolutely essential priorities, is the absolute necessity that this war not go broader or deeper, and that most notably, of course, means Hezbollah, which is, you know, Hamas fighters have shown how brutal they are. Hezbollah is better trained and better armed. We don't want them in the fight. We obviously don't want things to boil over as you said in the West Bank. We don't want other players in Syria getting involved.

When that starts happening, this becomes a global problem, which, of course, is why the aircraft carrier, the USS Ford is on station, why we've moved our air assets to send a very -- you know, to send an unmistakable signal that this is bad enough as is, let's not let it get wider, and that's obviously a message to Iran, to Lebanon, to Hezbollah, and to others.

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Well, Jim, I never say never because there shouldn't be people in Congress who say there's no way I can work with this person, right? What I can tell you, the public knows Jim Jordan. He has never been somebody who has been anything other than my way or the highway, ultimatum focused. We've got serious business to do both in everything that we've been talking about but in actually passing a federal budget so that we can do everything that we need to do and not shut down.

I'm quite nervous, frankly, that the Republicans may settle on a guy who is primarily a partisan warrior rather than a statesman.

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Thank you, Jim.

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