Lawmakers: Israeli plan to attack Iran dictated Trump’s decision on strikes

Senior lawmakers in both parties said Monday that the Trump administration’s decision to launch bombing and missile strikes across Iran this weekend was largely dictated by Israel’s plan to attack Iran with or without U.S. support.

Senior administration officials told Republican and Democratic lawmakers at a classified briefing on Capitol Hill that the Israeli plan to strike Iran pushed the United States to take preemptive action to protect U.S. troops stationed at bases throughout the Middle East, whom the Pentagon believed would have been targeted by retaliatory strikes.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who serves as vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee attended the briefing, said the decision to initiate a massive military assault on another country because of pressure from a U.S. ally put the nation in “uncharted” territory.

“This is still a war of choice that has been acknowledged by others that was dictated by Israel’s goals and timeline,” Warner told reporters at the briefing.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine provided the briefing to lawmakers Monday afternoon.

Warner said he supports Israel, but he questioned the decision to put American lives at risk when an imminent threat may be directed at an ally instead of the United States itself.

“Israel is a great ally of America. I stand firmly with Israel. But I believe at the end of the day when we are talking about putting American soldiers in harm’s way and we have American casualties and expectations of more, there needs to be the proof of an imminent threat to American interests. I still don’t think that standard has been met,” he said.

Warner argued if the military operation against Iran “was being driven by imminent security threats from Iran against America, I think we would have had better planning.”

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), speaking to reporters after the briefing, said that President Trump faced a tough call on ordering strikes against Iran when it became clear that Israel would launch military operations, even without U.S. support, which would have put U.S. troops in the region in danger.

“Israel was determined to act in their own defense here, with or without American support. Why? Because Israel faced what they deemed to be an existential threat. Iran was building missiles at a rapid clip to the point where our allies in the region could not keep up,” Johnson said.

“Because Israel was determined to act with or without the U.S., our commander in chief and the administration and the officials [in the Cabinet] had a very difficult decision to make. They had to evaluate the threats to the U.S., to our troops, to our installations, to our assets in the region in beyond,” Johnson said.

The Speaker said that senior Trump administration officials determined that “if Israel fired upon Iran” to destroy its weapons caches, then Iran “would have immediately retaliated against U.S. personnel and assets.”

“If we had waited for all those eventualities to take place, the consequences of inaction on our part would have been devastating,” Johnson argued.

“If Iran had begun to fire all of their missile arsenal, short- and mid-range missiles at our personnel and our assets and our installations, we would have suffered staggering losses,” he said.

“If we had waited to respond before acting first, those losses would have been far greater than if we had done what we did,” he added.

Rubio, speaking to reporters before the briefing, said the threat of Iranian retaliation against U.S. troops in response to an attack by Israel was a driving factor in the decision to launch U.S. strikes across Iran.

“The second question I’ve been asked is ‘Why now?’ Well, there are two reasons why now. The first is 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 said.

He said that Iran’s orders to retaliate against U.S. troops and installations had been delegated down to field commanders well before Israel and the United States launched the weekend’s strikes.

“If we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties,” he said.

“So, 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,” he asserted.

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