U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that Iran had “absolutely” posed an imminent threat to the United States, backing President Donald Trump’s justification for the urgency of attacking the Islamic Republic.
“We knew that if Iran was attacked, even by someone else, they would immediately come after us and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded,” Rubio told the media in Washington, D.C.
“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,” Rubio said.
Democratic lawmakers took to Sunday news shows to criticize Trump’s decision to launch military strikes on Iran without consulting Congress and disputed his claim that the U.S. faced an “imminent” threat.
Sen. Mark Warner from Virginia, top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that he had not seen evidence that “Iran was on the verge of launching any kind of pre-emptive strike against the United States of America.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) called the campaign “an illegal war” and said Iran was about “a decade” away from developing missiles capable of reaching the U.S., in an interview with “Fox News Sunday.”
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) also challenged the justification for the strikes, referencing Trump’s earlier assertion that the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June had “obliterated” its atomic capabilities.
“There was simply no basis to go in with this massive military campaign, with the goal of regime change,” Schiff told ABC‘s “This Week.” “The concern here is that we have unleashed factors in the region now that we cannot control.”
The White House stated on Sunday that the military campaign was undertaken “to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime, destroy its ballistic missile arsenal, degrade its proxy terror networks and cripple its naval forces.”
