Secretary of State Marco Rubio expanded on the reasons why the Trump administration chose to launch Operation Epic Fury against Iran, including knowing that Israel already planned an operation.
“So, the United States conducted this operation with a very clear goal in mind. I haven’t gotten a chance to see a lot of reporting. I don’t understand what the confusion is. Let me explain it to you and I’ll do it, once again, as clearly as possible. Perhaps you’ll report it that way. The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran’s short range ballistic missiles and the threat posed by their navy, particularly to naval assets. That is what it is focused on doing right now and it’s doing quite successfully. I will leave it to the Pentagon and the Department of War to discuss the tactics behind that and the progress being made. That is the clear objective of this mission.”“The second question that’s been asked is, why now? Well, there’s two reasons why now. The first is it was abundantly clear that, if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States. The orders have been delegated down to the field commanders, it was automatic and in fact, it beared to be true because, in fact, the — within one hour of the initial attack on the leadership compound, the missile forces in the south and in the north, for that matter, had already been activated to la launch. In fact, those are even pre-positioned.”“The third is the assessment that was made that, 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. 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 and perhaps even higher those killed, and then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.”
Rubio also didn’t take any bait from the reporters, including one who tried to “gotcha” Rubio about an imminent threat from Iran:
There absolutely was an imminent threat. And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked and we believe they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded, because the Department of War assessed that, if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked and by someone else, Israel attacked them. They hit us first and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths. 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.
Let’s not forget that the Iranian regime has literal American blood on its hands since it came into power in 1979.
Earlier today, President Donald Trump laid out the objectives of the operation:
First, we’re destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, and you see that happening on an hourly basis and their capacity to produce brand new ones and pretty good ones, they make.Second, we’re annihilating their Navy. We’ve knocked out already ten ships. They’re at the bottom of the sea.Third, we’re ensuring that the world’s number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon, never going to have a nuclear weapon. I said that from the beginning. They’re never going to have a nuclear weapon. They were on the road to getting one legitimately through a deal that was signed foolishly by our country.And finally, we’re ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund, and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.
The fourth objective is so important. Iran is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.
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