The United States attacked Iran only after learning that ally Israel was going to strike and fearing Tehran would retaliate against US forces, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday, March 2. “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,” Rubio told reporters.

Rubio, who was preparing to brief key US lawmakers, said that Iran had told field commanders to respond automatically against US forces if there was an attack. “If we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties. And so the president made the very wise decision” to hit alongside Israel, Rubio said.

Asked if the US faced an imminent threat from Iran – a key threshold in the US, as Congress constitutionally has the power to declare war – Rubio again pointed to the Israeli plans. “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,” Rubio said. “We were not going to sit there and absorb a blow,” Rubio said, adding that if Iran hit US forces first, “we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.”

Congress

Some lawmakers now want to reassert Congress’s role, which under the US Constitution is the only body that can declare war. In late January, as a huge US military buildup in the Middle East rumbled on, Senator Tim Kaine introduced a bill designed to force Donald Trump to obtain authorization from Congress to engage in any military conflict with Iran. On Saturday, he urged Congress to return immediately from recess to take up his resolution, and a vote is expected this week.

“There was no imminent threat to the United States of America by the Iranians. There was a threat to Israel,” Senator Mark Warner, the lead Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters after the meeting. “If we equate a threat to Israel as the equivalent of an imminent threat to the United States, then we are in uncharted territory.”

‘Needed to happen’

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier said that it was Israel that carried out the strike Saturday in Tehran that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other key officials, after intelligence emerged that they were meeting.

Rubio, however, said that President Trump’s administration believed in the need to strike Iran, regardless of how the timing was triggered. “No matter what, ultimately this operation needed to happen,” Rubio said.

Rubio said that the US would like to see the overthrow of Iran’s clerical state, but said that that was not the goal. “We hope that the Iranian people can overthrow this government and establish a new future for that country. We would love for that to be possible,” Rubio said. “But the objective of this mission is the destruction of their ballistic missile capabilities and of their naval capabilities.”