It took months for the Bush administration’s falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to come to light, after an invasion, a regime change, an investigation and, finally, the truth. For the Trump administration’s warnings about an imminent threat from Iran, it took an afternoon.
On Capitol Hill on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly debunked the Trump administration’s claims that Iran was planning a preemptive strike by adding a key piece of information: Israel was planning to strike first.
“We knew there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that would precipitate an attack on American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively pursue them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer greater casualties,” Rubio said Tuesday.
There were two corollaries of that bomb behind the largest US military intervention in a generation. First, that senior US officials had misled the public on Saturday when they warned of Iran’s plans to launch a pre-emptive strike. And second, that Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu played a much larger role than previously admitted in inciting the United States to launch attacks against Iran.
As expected, Democrats were apoplectic. “There was no imminent threat to the United States of America from the Iranians,” said Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, who had received classified briefings from Rubio. “There was a threat to Israel. If we equate a threat to Israel with an imminent threat to the United States, then we are in uncharted territory.”
“I think Secretary Rubio inadvertently told the truth here: This was driven by Benjamin Netanyahu and we are in a major conflict here,” Sen. Angus King said while questioning Elbridge Colby, a Pentagon official in charge of policy planning.
The administration has understandably bristled at the accusation that Netanyahu pressured Trump into participating in this latest war. (His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, retweeted an article with the helpful headline: No, Marco Rubio Didn’t Claim Israel Dragged Trump into War with Iran.)
“I think they were going to strike first, and I didn’t want that to happen. So, if anything, it might have forced Israel’s hand,” Trump said while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “We were negotiating with these lunatics and in my opinion they (Iran) were going to attack first.”
Since Trump began assembling his Middle East “army” in the largest buildup since the Iraq War, the administration has laid out a series of justifications for the attack on Iran. And it still doesn’t seem to have been resolved why the United States is now at war.
It began with Trump’s claims that he was sending warships to the Middle East because of Iran’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, which he claimed had killed 35,000 people (other estimates have been more conservative).
Then there was the Iranian nuclear program, which US special envoy Steve Witkoff said had been reconstituted since it was “eliminated” last summer and could allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon within a week.
Then there was Iran’s ballistic weapons program, which Trump said could soon strike not only against American interests in the region, but also against the United States itself. He provided no evidence, and US intelligence estimates had said the opposite: that Tehran would not have such a capability for at least a decade.
Most recently, it was the warning that Iran was planning an imminent attack, which Trump said was completely unrelated to the negotiations.
