Israel’s determination to attack Iran and the certainty that US troops would be targeted in response forced the Trump administration to take pre-emptive strikes, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said, in a new explanation for Washington’s surprise entry into the conflict.
The rationale drew divided reviews from top members of Congress who on Monday evening received the first briefing by the Trump administration since it ordered the air campaign to begin over the weekend.
Rubio; the CIA director, John Ratcliffe; and joint chiefs of staff, chair Dan Caine; spoke to the lawmakers behind closed doors in the Capitol ahead of a vote expected later this week in the House of Representatives on a war powers resolution that presents an unlikely opportunity to force Trump to end hostilities against Iran.
“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,” Rubio told reporters at the Capitol.
“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 pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
JD Vance said in an interview on Fox News on Monday night that the US aim was to make sure “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”.
“The president wants to make it clear to the Iranians and to the world that he is not going to rest until he accomplishes that all-important objective of ensuring that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon,” the vice-president said.
Vance has been the member of Donald Trump’s administration most opposed to military interventions and has spoken less frequently about US actions in Iran than Rubio.
Since the conflict began, the United States and Israel have carried out waves of airstrikes across Iran, and Tehran has retaliated with drone and missile attacks against US-aligned countries across the Middle East.
The air campaign has killed several of Iran’s top military and political leaders, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The US military has acknowledged the deaths of six service members, while the Iranian Red Crescent Society said more than 500 people have been killed in the country.
Reactions to the administration’s explanation for entering the war split along party lines, with Republicans rushing to defend Trump’s gambit while Democrats condemned what they view as an unnecessary conflict with unclear goals.
“This is Trump’s war. This is a war of choice. He has no strategy, he has no endgame,” the Senate’s Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer said before going into the briefing.
As he exited, Schumer said that lawmakers present asked “a whole lot of questions” but he found the officials’ responses “completely and totally insufficient. In fact, at least to me, that briefing raised many more questions than it answered.”
Mark Warner, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said he was worried for the implications of the US allowing Israel to essentially force it into a new war.
“There was no imminent threat to the United States of America by the Iranians. There was a threat to Israel. If we equate a threat to Israel as the equivalent of an imminent threat to the United States, then we are in uncharted territory,” Warner said.
On Monday night, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told Fox News that Iran had been building new underground sites “that would make their ballistic missile programs and their atomic bomb programs immune within months”.
“If no action was taken now, no action could be taken in the future,” he said.
Iran denies seeking a nuclear weapon.
In recent interviews with news outlets, Trump has outlined various goals in the war, including destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and their navy, preventing the country from developing a nuclear weapon and cutting off Tehran’s support of proxy forces elsewhere in the Middle East.
Rubio, however, mentioned only of two goals to reporters: destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capability and their navy. Following the classified briefing, Warner said he was not sure what Trump’s endgame is.
“I think the president needs to come before the Congress, for that matter, the American people, and decide amongst these four or five goals that have been laid out, what is the real goal?” the Virginia senator said.
“What is the objective? What is our exit plan? What obligation do we have now to the Iranian people if they do rise up, based upon his call for them to go to the streets? And what is the imminent threat to the United States’s interest to cause this conflict?”
Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House and close Trump ally, defended the president’s course of action, saying he had ordered a “defensive operation”.
“Israel was determined to act in their own defense here, with or without American support. Why? Because Israel faced what they deem to be an existential threat,” Johnson said.
While the war’s objective, he said, was not “to go in and take out the regime”, he nonetheless cheered the ayatollah’s death.
“That happened and in my estimation, that is a great development for freedom loving people around the world,” Johnson told reporters, speaking alongside the Republican chairs of the House intelligence and appropriations committee – the latter’s presence an indication that lawmakers may soon be asked to approve additional defense funding necessitated by the war.
Trump ordered the attack on Iran without first seeking Congress’ permission, though Rubio said a group of lawmakers known as the Gang of Eight – composed of the Democratic and Republicans leaders in each chamber, as well as the two parties’ top lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees – were notified before the attack began.
The House is expected to later this week consider a war powers resolution that, if enacted, force Trump to end hostilities against Iran. It faces a high bar to passage. Republicans control both chambers of Congress, and rarely cross Trump in significant numbers.
Even if Congress were to approve the resolution, Trump could veto it, and Congress could override that only with a two-thirds majority vote.
Previous war powers resolutions introduced in this Congress have been voted down, and Johnson said he was confident the latest one would not pass the House.
“The idea that we would take the ability of our commander in chief, the president, take his authority away right now to finish this job, is a frightening prospect to me. It’s dangerous,” Johnson said. “I am certainly hopeful and I believe we do have votes to put it down.”
