Donald Trump and Marco Rubio contradict each other regarding the origin of the attacks against Iran.
President Donald Trump said he ordered US forces to join Israel’s attack on Iran because he believed Iran was about to strike first, contradicting the justification offered a day earlier by his secretary of state on how the war began.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the US launched the attack because of fears that Iran would retaliate in response to planned Israeli action against Tehran.
‘We knew there was going to be Israeli action; we knew that would precipitate an attack on US forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively strike before they launched those attacks, we would suffer more casualties,’ Rubio said.
Trump rejected suggestions that Israel pushed the United States into the conflict, while his administration offered varying accounts and faced criticism from some supporters and Democrats who accused him of launching a ‘war of choice.’ ‘I could have forced their hand (Israel’s),’ Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during his meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. ‘We were negotiating with these lunatics, and I thought they were going to attack first. If we didn’t do it, they would attack first. I was convinced of that.’ Iran has claimed that the US attack was unprovoked.
Attack in Iran
Several prominent conservative commentators stepped up their criticism of the attacks on Iran, arguing that Rubio’s comments indicated that Israel, not the Trump administration, was calling the shots.
‘So he’s telling us bluntly that we’re at war with Iran because Israel forced us to,’ conservative podcaster Matt Walsh wrote about Rubio to his 4 million followers on X. ‘This is basically the worst thing he could have said.’ Megyn Kelly, a conservative podcaster, told her audience that she had doubts about Trump’s decision to attack Iran.
‘Our government’s job is not to take care of Iran or Israel. It’s to take care of us. And I feel like this is clearly Israel’s war,’ Kelly said in remarks released before Rubio’s statements. Criticism from Trump’s right wing comes as his Republican Party struggles to maintain control of the US Congress in November’s midterm elections.
Damage control
The debate over preparations for war has forced the White House to try to control the damage.
On Tuesday, Trump answered questions from the press in public for the first time since the US-Israeli air war began three days earlier. Previously, he had discussed the attacks in two videos, one-on-one interviews with selected journalists and brief statements on Monday at the White House.
The president claimed to believe that Iran was about to launch attacks, without presenting evidence to support his view, following negotiations between the US and Iran last Thursday in Geneva. Iran described those talks as positive, with more expected in the coming days.
‘It was something that had to be done,’ said Trump, who did not present detailed arguments in favour of war against Iran before it began. Rubio, pressed on Tuesday about his earlier comment during a visit to Capitol Hill, told reporters: ‘In short: the president decided that they would not attack us first. It’s that simple, folks.’
Two senior Trump administration officials held a conference call with reporters on Tuesday to describe the events leading up to the military operations, particularly the talks in Geneva with Iranian officials, held by US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with Oman acting as mediator. Both officials said Witkoff and Kushner repeatedly pressed Iran to abandon uranium enrichment. Instead, Iran presented a plan that would allow them to enrich uranium to higher percentages at the Tehran Research Reactor in northern Iran, they said.
US Special Envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff – REUTERS/ EVELYN HOCKSTEIN
The US envoys felt that the Iranians were employing delaying tactics, according to the officials.
‘They were not willing to give up the basic elements they needed to preserve in order to get a nuclear bomb,’ one official said. Iran denies seeking a nuclear weapon. The envoys reported back to Trump, telling him that it might have been possible to reach a nuclear deal similar to the one former President Barack Obama’s team and world powers negotiated with Iran in 2015, but that it would take months. Trump ordered US forces into action the next day, and the strikes began on Saturday.