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Secretary of State Marco Rubio, about to step into a meeting with members of Congress, contradicted what some of those members had been told over the weekend about President Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), one of the “Gang of Eight,” said Sunday he was told there had been no intelligence indicating Iran was just about to strike U.S. assets.
On Monday, Rubio told reporters: “There absolutely was an imminent threat, and the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked — and we believed they would be attacked — that they would immediately come after us,” he said.
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Rubio added that the U.S. was aware Israel was planning to take action against Iran, and officials believed that those strikes would have prompted an Iranian response against U.S. assets.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he said.
“We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage,” Rubio said.
Rubio went on to note that the U.S. “would love” to see a new regime in Iran, but stressed that the main purpose of the military operation was to weaken Iran’s ballistic missile and naval capabilities.
Those comments appeared to suggest the U.S.’ goals for the military operation involved undermining Iran’s access to weapons in the longterm, in addition to addressing an “imminent threat.”
Rubio also echoed the president when he said “the hardest hits” against Iran “are yet to come,” while offering an open-ended estimate for the timing of the conflict.
“I don’t know how long it will take, we have objectives,” he said. “We will do this as long as it takes to achieve those objectives.”
English (US) ·