US ‘publicly acknowledging’ it was ‘entrapped by the Israelis’
By
Ali Harb
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
has suggested that Israeli plans to attack Iran determined the timing of the US strikes that initiated the war.
Rubio said Washington was aware Israel was going to attack Iran, and Tehran would retaliate against US interests in the region, so US forces struck pre-emptively.
“What he’s basically publicly acknowledging would be that the United States was entrapped by the Israelis,” Kelly Grieco, senior fellow at the Stimson Center, said of Rubio’s comments.
She added the United States has “enormous sources of leverage when it comes to Israel”, referring to the billions of dollars in military aid that Washington gives to Israel annually.
“The notion that the Israelis were going to do it anyway, and so we had to do it as well – if that’s the case, then there’s a really serious conversation to be had here in the United States about US and Israeli interests, and where those are aligned and where they diverge,” Grieco told Al Jazeera.
‘We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,’ Marco Rubio tells reporters on Capitol Hill [Ken Cedeno/Reuters]
