The admission this week by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, echoed by Mike Johnson, speaker of the House of Representatives, that Israel forced Washington’s hand in attacking Iran has rightly caused consternation.
Breathing life into something that would normally be treated as an antisemitic trope, Rubio argued that the Trump administration had been left with no choice but to attack Iran because, had it not, Israel would have launched an attack anyway, exposing U.S. soldiers to retaliation.
Rubio stated:
“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.”
Rubio was using the term “preemptively” in a highly irregular and misleading way.
In international law, aggression is an illegal application of force — the “supreme international crime,” according to the 1950 principles set out by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. But there is a potential mitigating factor if the attacking state can show it was acting pre-emptively: that is, it was acting to prevent a plausible, immediate and severe threat of attack.
Rubio, however, was not suggesting that the U.S. acted “preemptively” against a threat from Iran. He meant Washington had acted preemptively to stop its ally, Israel, from setting off a chain of military events that would lead to U.S. soldiers being harmed.
Had the Trump administration really been acting preemptively in these circumstances, the U.S. should have attacked Israel, not Iran.
Hellbound and Down 