On Capitol Hill, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio informed reporters that regime change was not the goal of the operations against Iran.
The announcement follows the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, March 1, in joint US-Israeli airstrikes of his residence-office complex.
Speaking to reporters, Marco Rubio stated that the primary goal of the strikes was to halt Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs, not to overthrow the Iranian government.
Iran has maintained for a long time that it has no desire to develop a nuclear weapon. Although its ballistic missiles might strike American allies and US forces in the area, they were unable to reach the US directly.
“The objectives of this operation are to eliminate their ballistic missile capacity and make sure they can not rebuild, and make sure that they can not hide behind that to have a nuclear program,” the Secretary of State stated. But according to Rubio, there were no objections to the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“We would love for their to be an Iran that is not governed by extremist Shia clergy,” stated Marco Rubio, claiming that the United States would welcome a new Iranian government. Even if we would love to see a new government, the fact is that in a year, whoever is in charge of that nation will not have these drones or ballistic missiles to threaten us.”
He also cautioned that the most difficult strikes are still to come.
Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill, “I am not going to give away the details of our tactical actions, but the hardest attacks are still to come from the US military.” “Iran will face considerably more punishment in the next phase than it does now.”
The secretary of state added that the United States decided to launch a barrage of missiles at Iran because of Israel’s planned attacks.
“We anticipated an Israeli action. We were aware that this would lead to an assault on American troops. And we were aware that we would sustain more casualties if we did not pursue them before they initiated those attacks,” he stated.
“We thought they would attack, that they would pursue us right away, and we were not going to sit there and take a hit.”
However, Donald Trump had previously stated that he made the decision to attack Iran after the Geneva talks finished without a deal on Thursday, March 26.
