Rubio claim of Israeli role in US-Iran attack reverberates despite denial
By Al Jazeera, March 4, 2026On Monday, March 2, 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio provided a looping justification for the US launching a war against Iran: Israel was planning to strike Iran, which would have prompted Tehran to strike the US assets in the region, requiring Washington to launch preemptive strikes on Iran.
Even as the administration of US President Donald Trump has sought to roll back claims made by several officials in recent days, they have continued to spark dismay across the political spectrum.
Rubio’s statement was particularly notable, given the assessment by many Iran analysts that the US-Israel war, which has led to regional retaliation from Iran, serves the interests not of Washington, but of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Washington is seen as having outsized leverage over Israel, to which it has provided more than Ksh45 trillion in military aid since 1948, including Ksh3.15 trillion during Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Trump, when asked about Rubio’s statement on Tuesday, March 3, 2026, appeared to offer a different characterisation, saying he launched the war because he “thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked”.
“They [Iran] were getting ready to attack Israel. They were gonna attack others,” he said.
The US president has spent the days since launching the initial strikes on Saturday arguing that the holistic threat posed by Iran justified the US-Israeli strikes, a position that experts say likely stands in contravention of both US and international law. The administration has provided scant evidence of a planned attack on US assets or that either Iran’s nuclear or ballistic programmes offered an immediate threat.
Rubio on Monday also sought to distance himself from his statements, claiming his words had been taken out of context.
Rubio had, in earlier comments, pointed to the broader threat posed by Iran, including its ballistic missile and drone capacity. But then he turned to what he called the question of “why now?”
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” he told reporters. “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.”
Stunning admission
The shifting messaging on Tuesday was unlikely to allay the condemnation from Trump critics and supporters alike, including several influential figures within Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) base.
Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told Al Jazeera that “what he’s basically publicly acknowledging would be that the United States was entrapped by the Israelis”.
“The notion that the Israelis were going to do it anyway, and so we had to do it as well – if that’s the case, then there’s a really serious conversation to be had here in the United States about US and Israeli interests, and where those are aligned and where they diverge,” Grieco said.