On Monday, before briefing members of the House and Senate on what’s going on in Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took questions from the media.
One thing he made very clear was this: “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.”
Later, a reporter asked, “Are you saying the U.S. was forced to strike because of an impending Israeli action?”
Rubio responded with a plain and clear “no,” adding that “ultimately, this operation needed to happen.”
But as Scott Pinsker pointed out this morning, the fake news did what the fake news does, and everyone from Reuters to Axios ran with headlines that implied we were fighting Israel’s war and that’s the only reason we struck Iran.
Well, on Tuesday afternoon, Rubio is, once again, briefing members of Congress, and he came armed and ready to shut down this stupid narrative.
“We’re gonna unleash Chang on these people in the next few hours and days,” he said, adding, “You’re gonna really begin to perceive a change in the scope and in the intensity of these attacks as frankly the two most powerful air forces in the world take apart this terroristic regime and defang it and take away its ability to threaten its neighbors or hide behind a zone of immunity that allows them to develop their nuclear ambitions.”
“This terroristic, radical cleric-led regime cannot be ever allowed to have nuclear weapons,” he continued. “We saw what they were willing to do to their own people. They were willing to slaughter their own people in the streets. Imagine what they would do to us. Imagine what they would do to others. Under President Trump, that will never ever happen.”
Then he took questions from the media. The very first one? “Mr. Secretary, yesterday you told us that Israel was going to strike Iran and that that’s why we needed to get involved…”
“No. Your statement is false,” Rubio replied.
He asked the reporter if she was there on Monday, and she said, “Yeah, I asked the question.”
Rubio went on to say that when he was asked on Monday if we went in because of Israel, he said “no” and explained again the president’s stance and scolded the press for only telling part of the truth (emphasis mine):
The president made a decision, and the decision he made was that Iran was not gonna be allowed to hide be- behind its ballistic missile program, that Iran was not gonna be allowed to hide behind its ability to conduct these attacks.
That decision had been made. The president systematically made a decision to systematically destroy this terroristic capability that they had, and we carried that out. I was very clear in that answer. This was a question of timing, of why this had to happen as a joint operation, not the question of the intent. Once the president made a decision that negotiations were not gonna work, that they were playing us on the negotiations, and that this was a threat that was untenable, the decision was made to strike them.
That’s what I said yesterday, and you guys need to play it. And if you’re gonna play these statements, you need to play the whole statement, not clip it to reach a narrative that you wanna do, all right?
After taking a few more questions, another reporter told Rubio that he wanted to clarify what he said.
Rubio said, “There’s nothing to clarify.” He told the guy that he needed to read the whole statement. Not just parts of it.
But the guy kept talking, and Rubio finally told him to be quiet. “Okay, but let me answer. This is my press conference.” Then he explained it again in very plain English:
I was asked a very specific question, and so you guys can misrepresent it, but I was asked a very specific question yesterday. The bottom line is this: The president’s determined we were not gonna get hit first. It’s that simple, guys.
We are not gonna put Americans troops in harm’s way. If you tell the President of the United States that if we don’t go first, we’re gonna have more people killed and more people injured, the president’s going to go first.
That’s what he did. That’s what the president will always do. He will always put the safety and security of our men and women in uniform and of all Americans before anything else. He’s always going to do that, and that’s what he did here. In addition to that, I would argue that this threat from Iran, they are hiding behind these missiles and hiding behind these drones.
They wanted to reach a point where you couldn’t touch them, and then they could do whatever the hell they wanted with their nuclear program, and there was no way in the world that this terroristic regime was going to get nuclear weapons, not under Donald Trump’s watch.
Despite the fact that Rubio made it clear that we were defending our own national security, and that the timing just happened to be right, I’m sure we’ll see another round of headlines about how we’re only doing this because of Israel. The fake news doesn’t care what the reality is — they just print what they want to anyway.
One more exchange that left me laughing was that one reporter said that the Democrats came out yesterday and criticized him. Rubio cut him off and said, “They’re gonna always criticize. We’ve been doing this for years, guys… I’ll tell you right now, they’re gonna come out after the briefing and say, ‘We didn’t hear anything. We have more questions than answers,’ you mark my words.”
That’s exactly what they do.
You can watch the entire exchange here. It’s pretty entertaining.
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