US-Iran conflict: Marco Rubio tells why US attacked first, says ‘we would suffer higher casualties if…’

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday presented a strikingly new narrative of how the conflict started, saying that the United States joined only after learning that ally Israel was set to strike Iran.

He said that although the US and Israel jointly attacked Iran first, Washington was acting to thwart an immediate threat because Israel was going to strike Iran on its own, anyway.

Iran was ready to strike US forces in the region in response to Israel, so Trump decided to strike "pre-emptively" alongside Israel.

Rubio told reporters, “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.”

The state secretary’s comments came minutes before the US military confirmed that its death toll from the conflict had risen to six, after they recovered two bodies from a regional facility struck by Iran.

Rubio said there was absolutely an imminent threat. He said, “And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked – and we believed 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."

"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.

Rubio also explained why Operation Epic Fury was "so important."

"The purpose of this is to destroy that missile capability. Why does Iran want that ballistic missile capability? What they are trying to do, and have been trying to do for a very long time, is build a convention weapons capability as a shield where they can hide behind — meaning there would come a point where they have so many conventional missiles, so many drones, and can inflict so much damage that no one can do anything about their nuclear program. That is what they were trying to do," Rubio said.

“We hope that the Iranian people can overthrow this government. We would love for that to be possible — but the objective of this mission is the destruction of their ballistic capabilities and of their naval capabilities,” Rubio said.

The Israel-US joint strikes on Iran on 28 February killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior officials of Iran. The conflict spread to other parts of the Middle East, including Bahrain, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.