Two days into the US attack on Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the extraordinary claim that the war was, in fact, a legal, pre-emptive defensive measure necessitated by Israel’s own pending strikes on the country. Scrambling for a legal figleaf for the US role in the aggression, he claimed that the Israeli strikes alone would have led to Iranian retaliation against US forces in the region, and therefore Iran, although it did not know it, posed an imminent threat to the US, which the US had the legal right to pre-emptively defend itself against. “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 told reporters on March 2nd.
