United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill that the strike on Iran was not aimed at regime change. The statement comes days after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a joint US-Israeli airstrike on his compound on Saturday, March 1.
Marco Rubio told reporters that while the goal was not regime change in Iran, the main purpose of the strikes was to end Tehran’s missile and nuclear programs.
Iran has long insisted that it does not want to build a nuclear bomb. While its ballistic missiles are capable of hitting US forces in the region as well as US allies, it did not have the capability to hit the US directly.
The Foreign Secretary said: “The aim of this operation is to destroy their ballistic missile capability and make sure they can’t rebuild and make sure they can’t hide behind it to have a nuclear programme.” But Rubio said there was no objection to killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Marco Rubio stated that the United States would welcome a new regime in Iran, saying, “We would like to see an Iran that is not run by radical Shiite clerics. While we would like to see a new regime, the bottom line is that no matter who rules that country in a year, they will not have these ballistic missiles and they will not threaten to have them.”
He also warned that the hardest blows were yet to come.
“I won’t divulge the details of our tactical efforts, but the hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military,” Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill. “The next phase will be even more punishing for Iran than it is now.”
The Secretary of State also said that Israel’s impending strikes on Iran were the reason why America proceeded to launch a barrage of missiles at Iran. Also read | How did Israel track down, isolate and kill Khamenei? Hacked traffic cameras, disruption of the network on Pasteurova street and others
“We knew there was going to be Israeli action. We knew it would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively attack them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he said.
“We believed they were going to be attacked, that they were going to come after us immediately, and we weren’t going to sit there and absorb the blow.
But Donald Trump earlier said he had decided to launch an attack on Iran after talks ended in Geneva on Thursday, March 26, without a deal.
(With input from agencies)
