Rubio's Preposterous Preventive War Argument

There is in fact no “kick them while they’re down” exception to the prohibition on the use of force.

Marco Rubio tries to spin U.S.-Israeli aggression:

“The bottom line is this: The president determined we were not going to get hit first. It’s that simple, guys,” Mr. Rubio said. “We are not going put American troops in harm’s way [bold mine-DL]. If you tell the president of the United States that if we don’t go first, we’re going to have more people killed and more people injured, the president’s going to go first. That’s what he did. That’s what the president will always do.”

This is Rubio’s attempt at damage control, but this answer is even worse than the one he gave the day before. If the U.S. and Israel hadn’t attacked, U.S. forces weren’t going to get “hit” at all. The president’s threat against Iran was the main reason that American troops were in any danger in the first place. Trump put them all in harm’s way the moment he gave the order to strike. The president chose to get Americans killed and injured for no good reason. That is the shameful policy that Rubio is so ineptly defending.

If the Trump administration didn’t want to put American troops in harm’s way, they would not have ginned up this fake crisis with Iran and they would not have been planning a joint attack with Israel for the last few months. American troops and citizens are in harm’s way across the region solely because of Trump and Netanyahu’s decision to initiate a war of aggression. If the president had not “gone first,” there would have been no American casualties in the last few days.

Rubio also made the most preposterous preventive war argument of all time:

“The president of the United States made a decision: This is intolerable. Iran cannot have these missiles, cannot have these drones, cannot threaten the world,” Mr. Rubio said. “The president said this is the weakest they’ve ever been. If we don’t hit them now, a year from now, a year and a half from now, no one will be able to touch them and they’ll be able to do whatever they want and he made a decision to go.”

The Secretary must not have thought this one through, because he just admitted that the U.S. and Israel struck because Iran was exceptionally weak and therefore not threatening at all. There is in fact no “kick them while they’re down” exception to the prohibition on the use of force. The future threat that Rubio conjures up here is purely imaginary. Even if there were some chance that this future threat might become a reality, that does not give the U.S. and Israel license to start a war now. Every state could claim that it is heading off some terrible future threat by attacking its neighbor, but that is simply waging a war of aggression out of irrational fear.

It is remarkable that aggressors feel the need to pretend that they are not waging a war of aggression when they clearly are. They have no problem committing the crime, but they still don’t want their crime to be described accurately. Perhaps the aggressors don’t want to be held responsible for the death and destruction that they caused, and so they desperately try to blame the victim for “forcing” them to attack.

The Secretary said that “Iran cannot have these missiles, cannot have these drones, cannot threaten the world,” which treats Iran’s ability to defend itself as an “intolerable” threat to everyone. What the U.S. and Israel truly found intolerable was that Iran had not been completely defanged. That limited the U.S. and Israeli ability to strike at will. The issue has never been the threat that Iran posed to the region or the world, but the limits that Iranian capabilities put on U.S. and Israeli freedom of action. Trump and Netanyahu wish to be able to dictate terms to Iran and punish them if they resist. This is essentially imperial policing dressed up as something else.

Rubio claimed that Iran would “be able to do whatever they want” in a year or two, but this is absurd. If they are at the weakest they have ever been, they are not going to become an invulnerable juggernaut in the next two years no matter what they do. The Secretary is a fool if he believes any of this nonsense, and we would be fools to believe anything this disgrace says.