The White House has rushed to contain an escalating political uproar regarding conflicting accounts of the unprovoked attacks
US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have put forward conflicting rationales for the American conflict with Iran, as the White House works to contain an expanding political storm over divergent accounts of what prompted the operation against Tehran.
The Pentagon is also reportedly perplexed about the actual objectives of the operation and the feasibility of conducting a prolonged military campaign with restricted resources.
What reason did Trump give for launching a war on Iran?
When speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump claimed he ordered US forces to join Israel’s offensive because he thought Tehran was on the verge of striking first.
“We were in negotiations with these lunatics, and I thought they were going to attack first. If we hadn’t done it, they would have attacked first,” Trump stated, providing no evidence to back up the claim.
He also hinted that he might have “pushed Israel into action” by deciding to carry out what his administration has labeled as a preemptive strike on Iran.
What has Rubio said about the reasons for war with Iran?
Trump’s explanation directly clashed with Rubio’s statement from the previous day. On Monday, the secretary of state told reporters that Washington launched the attack because it knew Israeli action was imminent and feared Iranian retaliation against US forces.
“We knew there was going to be an Israeli action; we knew that would trigger an attack on US forces, and we knew that if we didn’t strike preemptively before they launched those attacks, we would sustain more casualties,” Rubio said.
What’s been the reaction to the contradicting narratives?
The conflicting justifications have sparked anger among Trump’s conservative base, with prominent commentators accusing the administration of deceiving the public about being pulled into a war on Israel’s account.
Conservative podcaster Matt Walsh criticized Rubio’s admission, saying that “he’s plainly telling us that we’re at war with Iran because Israel pushed us into it. This is essentially the worst thing he could have said.”
Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly similarly questioned Trump’s decision, emphasizing that “our government’s duty is not to watch over Iran or Israel. It’s to watch over us. And this feels very much to me like it’s clearly Israel’s war.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi responded to Rubio’s remarks by stating he essentially “acknowledged what we all knew: the US has entered a war of its own volition on Israel’s behalf. There was never any so-called Iranian ‘threat’.” He also criticized Trump for transforming “’America First’ into ‘Israel First’ – which always means ‘America Last’.”
What are US officials saying about the end goal of the campaign?
Besides the conflicting reasons for the initiation of the unprovoked attack on Iran, doubts have also been cast on the US and Israel’s ultimate aims for the operation, with some noting that they currently seem hazy and could lead to a protracted conflict.
“It’s completely all over the place at the moment,” former adviser to the late Senator John McCain, Richard Fontaine, confessed to Bloomberg, cautioning that “if you don’t know what you’re fighting for, then for one thing you don’t know when you’ve achieved it – and you don’t know when to stop.”
Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who has been given classified briefings on the operation, has recently also urged Trump to appear before Congress and clarify “what the real goal” of the campaign is. “What is the objective? What is our exit plan?”
Bloomberg reported that even within the Pentagon “some officials have also questioned the strategy due to growing worries about depleting already-limited stocks of key munitions and uncertainty regarding the operation’s goals.”
Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have maintained that the US has a practically limitless supply of weapons and ammunition.