Democrats, isolationists, and other Israel obsessives like to blame Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for all the wars of the Middle East. They found a new opening for their hobby horse yesterday with an out-of-context snippet from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio told the press. “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.”
A slew of the usual suspects pointed to the quote as proof that the Israeli leader had compelled, entrapped, or tricked a reluctant President Donald Trump to launch a strike at a regime that the president has long promised to punish.
The notion that Trump is the toady of a foreign leader (highly reminiscent of Russia collusion hysteria) or lacks the mettle to tell Netanyahu not to launch an attack during negotiations doesn’t align with reality. Last summer, Trump demanded Israel turn planes back that were already in the air headed to Iran on a mission, and Netanyahu complied.
None of this is to even mention that the administration has been building up a military presence in the region for months. When the president was asked today whether Israel pushed him to take military action, he replied: “If anything, I was the one who pushed it.”
Even more significant, though, the full context of Rubio’s remarks — he was talking about “why now,” not “why”— debunks the claim that we were dragged into action. Rubio was explicitly asked: “Was the U.S. forced to strike because of an impending Israeli action?”
“No,” he answered:
“No matter what, ultimately, this operation needed to happen — that’s the question of ‘why now?’ But this operation needed to happen because Iran, in about a year or a year and a half, would cross the line of immunity, meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it because they could hold the whole world hostage. Look at the damage they’re doing now — and this is a weakened Iran. Imagine a year from now. So, that had to happen. 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.”
Now, it’s certainly your prerogative not to believe Rubio. I’m highly skeptical that Israel would launch widespread attacks against the regime’s leadership without an enthusiastic thumbs up from the president. But omitting the fact that the secretary of state, whose words you rely on to allegedly demonstrate that the United States was “dragged” into war, also unambiguously states that the attack was imminent “no matter what,” means you were either too lazy to listen to the full context or too dishonest to care.
WHAT TRUMP SHOULD TELL THE PUBLIC ABOUT IRAN
To those who oppose action against Iran, any reliance or cooperation with Israel reads like a conspiracy. But the truth is, most of the people peddling the “Israel dragged us into war” canard will never support any military solution against the regime, no matter how many Americans it kills, no matter how close it is to nuclear weapons, no matter how many Chicom supersonic cruise missiles it buys, and no matter how big its stockpiles of ballistic weapons.
They should just say so.
