Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi early Tuesday weighed in on his American counterpart Marco Rubio’s justification for attacking Tehran.
“Mr. Rubio admitted what we all knew: the United States has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. There were never any so-called Iranian ‘threats,'” Araghchi said in a post on X.
“Both American and Iranian bloodshed is therefore the responsibility of Israel First. The American people deserve better and should take their country back,” he added.
Rubio admitted what we all knew: the United States has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. The so-called Iranian “threat” never existed.
Therefore, both American and Iranian bloodshed falls on “Israel First.”
The American people deserve better and should take their country back.
—Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) March 3, 2026
Araghchi’s statement came just hours after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Tuesday morning that the The United States was aware of Israel’s intentions. to attack Iran. Rubio, during the press conference, provided an explanation of the United States’ goals in joining with Israel to launch military action against Iran.
Rubio said the threat from Iran was “imminent” because he knew it would retaliate against the United States if attacked, including by Israel.
He said: “Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions and understood what that would mean for us, and we had to be prepared to act accordingly. But this had to happen no matter what.”
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“The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran’s short-range ballistic missiles and the threat posed by its Navy, particularly to naval assets. That is what it is focused on doing now, and it is doing it quite successfully,” he told reporters.
Shedding light on the timing of the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, Rubio said: “…It’s the assessment that was made that if we stayed and waited for that attack to happen first before we attacked them, we would suffer many more casualties. And so the President made a very wise decision. We knew there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that would precipitate an attack on US forces. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively pursue them before they launched those attacks, we would attack them.” we would suffer more casualties and maybe even more deaths and then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.”
He also said the United States joined because Washington felt Tehran would retaliate against American assets in the region.
“It was very clear that if Iran was attacked by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone else, they were going to respond and respond against the United States. The orders had been delegated to the field commanders. It was automatic. And in fact, it was proven to be true because, in fact, within an hour of the initial attack on the leadership complex, the missile forces in the south and in the north had actually already been activated for launch. In fact, they had already been pre-positioned,” he said.
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“And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked and we believed it would be attacked, they would come immediately after us. And we were not going to sit there and absorb a hit before responding because the War Department assessed that if we did that, if we waited to be hit first after they were attacked and by someone else, Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to attack us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths. We were proactively defensive to prevent them from causing further damage,” Rubio told the media.
He added: “The goals of this operation are to destroy their ballistic missile capability and make sure they can’t rebuild it and make sure they can’t hide behind that to have a nuclear program. That’s the goal of the mission.”
