Rubio: Israeli attack plan prompted US strike on Iran

(Patria) - The United States attacked Iran after learning that Israel would attack and fearing that Tehran would retaliate against American forces, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday.

"We knew that Israeli action was coming. We knew that it would provoke an attack on American forces, and we knew that if we didn't strike them preemptively before they launched those attacks, we would suffer greater casualties," Rubio told reporters, AFP reported.

Rubio, who was preparing to brief key US lawmakers, said Iran had told field commanders to automatically respond against American forces if an attack occurred.

"If we were to stand by and wait for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would have suffered far greater casualties. And so the President made a very wise decision" to strike alongside Israel, he said.

When asked if the United States faced an imminent threat from Iran, a key threshold in the United States because Congress constitutionally has the authority to declare war, Rubio again pointed to the Israeli plans.
"There was absolutely an imminent threat, and the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they were going to be attacked, that they would immediately go after us," he said.

"We were not going to sit there and take a punch," he said, adding that if Iran attacked American forces first, "we would all be answering questions around here about why we knew that and didn't act."

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had previously said that Israel carried out an attack in Tehran on Saturday that killed Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other key officials, after intelligence emerged that they had met.

Rubio, however, said that President Donald Trump's administration believed in the necessity of attacking Iran, regardless of how the timing was initiated.
"Regardless, this operation ultimately had to happen," Rubio said.
He said Washington would like to see the overthrow of Iran's clerical state, but that was not the objective.

"We hope that the Iranian people can overthrow this government and establish a new future for that country. We would love to see that happen," Rubio said. "But the objective of this mission is the destruction of their ballistic missile capabilities and their naval capabilities."