US entered a war of choice, Iran responds after Rubio claims ‘we were aware of Israel’s intentions’

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi early Tuesday weighed in on his American counterpart Marco Rubio’s justification for attacking Tehran. “Mr. Rubio admitted what we all knew: US has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. There was never any so-called Iranian ‘threat’,” Araghchi said in a post on X. “Shedding of both American and Iranian blood is thus on Israel Firsters. American people deserve better and should take back their country,” he added. > Mr. Rubio admitted what we all knew: U.S. has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. There was never any so-called Iranian "threat". Shedding of both American and Iranian blood is thus on Israel Firsters. American people deserve better and should take back their country. — Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) March 3, 2026 Mr. Rubio admitted what we all knew: U.S. has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. There was never any so-called Iranian "threat". Shedding of both American and Iranian blood is thus on Israel Firsters. American people deserve better and should take back their country. — Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) March 3, 2026 Araghchi’s statement came only a few hours after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters early Tuesday that the US was aware of Israel’s intentions of attacking Iran. Rubio, during the press conference, provided an explanation about US’s objectives behind joining Israel to launch military action against Iran. Rubio said that the threat from Iran was “imminent” because it knew it would retaliate against the US if attacked, including by Israel. He said, “Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions and understood what that would mean for us, and we had to be prepared to act as a result of it. But this had to happen no matter what.” “The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran’s short-range ballistic missiles and the threat posed by their Navy, particularly to naval assets. That is what it is focused on doing right now, and it’s doing quite successfully,” he told the reporters. Shedding light on the timing of the US-Israel strikes against Iran, Rubio said, “… It’s the assessment that was made that if we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties. And so the President made the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew 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 and perhaps even higher those killed. And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.” He also said that the US joined in because Washington felt that Tehran would retaliate against American assets in the region. “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. The orders had been delegated down to the field commanders. It was automatic. And in fact, it bared to be true because, in fact, within an hour of the initial attack on the leadership compound, the missile forces in the south and in the north, for that matter, had already been activated to launch. In fact, those had already been pre-positioned,” 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 because the Department of War assessed that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked and by someone else, Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths. We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage,” Rubio told the media. He added, “The objectives of this operation are to destroy their ballistic missile capability and make sure they can’t rebuild it and make sure that they can’t hide behind that to have a nuclear program. That’s the objective of the mission.”