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Amid the fog of war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed what prompted President Trump and the U.S. military to finally pull the trigger on attacking Iran.
“There’s two reasons why now,” Secretary Rubio told the press on Monday. “The first is that it was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States, Israel, or anyone, they were going to respond…against the United States. The orders had been delegated down to the field commanders. It was automatic.”
Rubio said that “within an hour” of the U.S. strikes on Iranian leadership “the missile forces in the south and in the north, for that matter, had already been activated to be launched; in fact, those had already been pre-positioned.”
Rubio said “there absolutely was an imminent threat” from Iran.
“The imminent threat was that we knew was that Iran was attacked, and we believed that they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us,” Rubio explained. “And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.”
He noted that the administration “knew there was going to be an Israeli action” 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.”
“The Department of War assessed that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first, after they were attacked by someone else, [like] Israel attacked them…we would suffer more casualties and more death,” Rubio said. “We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage. Had we not done so, there would have been hearings on Capitol Hill about how we knew that this was going to happen, and we didn’t act preemptively to prevent more casualties and more loss of life.”
Since the start of Operation Epic Fury over the weekend, U.S. Central Command has confirmed that as of 4 PM ET on Monday, six U.S. servicemembers have been killed in action.
According to Rubio, Iran is “suffering a tremendous amount of damage,” but noted that “the hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military.”
“The next phase will be even more punishing on Iran than it is right now…the world will be a safer place when we’re done with this operation,” Rubio noted.
