Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters at the U.S. Capitol on Monday that the “hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military” in its ongoing operation against Iran, which started with strikes early Saturday.
“The next phase will be even more punishing on Iran than it is right now,” Rubio said.
Earlier in the day, President Donald Trump said the goal of the operation is to destroy the country’s navy and ballistic missile capabilities, and to put a stop to its nuclear ambitions.
So far, the strikes have killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and 49 other Iranian leaders. The operation has also destroyed more than 1,000 targets, including missile sites, ships, submarines and control centers for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Iran has retaliated with attacks against neighboring countries, targeting civilian infrastructure such as airports and hotels, as well as military targets.
As of Monday evening, six American service members had died in the hostilities.
On Monday night, two drones from Iran struck the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Early reports said there were no injuries. Personnel at other U.S. embassies in the region have evacuated their compounds, NBC reported.
Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a media briefing on Monday that this Iranian strategy of “widening the war has backfired a bit.” The gulf states “are hanging tough together,” he said.
The State Department on Monday urged Americans to leave the Middle East due to serious security risks. Specific countries include Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Brigham Young University’s Jerusalem Center in Israel has canceled field trips for the coming week, and the students are sheltering at the center.
Rubio says the strikes are a response to imminent threat
Ahead of briefing members of Congress on Monday afternoon, Rubio told reporters that the operation in Iran would continue for “however long it takes” to achieve U.S. objectives.
Iran was producing more than 100 missiles a month, and in less than a year and a half, the country would have “crossed the line of immunity,” he said. “They would have had so many short-range missiles and drones that nobody could do anything about it, because they could hold the whole world hostage.”
Since last June, the number of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers has been halved, an Israeli official told The New York Times.
Rubio referenced a study conducted by the Department of War that analyzed potential attacks.
“If Iran was attacked and we knew they were going to be attacked, they would immediately come after us. We were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded,” he said.
He continued, “If we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths. We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage. Had we not done so, there would have been hearings on Capitol Hill about how we knew this was going to happen, and we didn’t act proactively to prevent more casualties and more loss of life.”
The Secretary of State said he’d notified the Gang of Eight both a week before the strike and the night before.
There will be no U.S. boots on the ground for now
Destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities (both launching and manufacturing) “can be achieved without ground forces,” Rubio said.
“Right now we’re not postured for ground forces,” he added.
In a phone call with The New York Post, President Trump echoed a similar sentiment: American soldiers on the ground in Iran are currently unnecessary, but the president wouldn’t rule it out.
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump said. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth added, “President Trump ensures our enemies understand we’ll go as far as we need to go to advance American interests. But we’re not dumb about it. You don’t have to roll 200,000 people in there and stay for 20 years.”
What will happen to the regime with Khamenei gone?
Khamenei ruled Iran for 36½ years before he was killed in an air strike on Saturday.
During his reign, Khamenei violently squashed multiple nationwide protests. Most recently, protests against the regime erupted over the country’s failing economy, lasting from late December through mid-January.
Following the same response tactics to earlier protests, the Islamic theocracy shut off the country’s internet access. During the internet blackout, they delivered a deadly response with “shoot-to-kill” orders. Death toll estimates range widely, with some topping 30,000.
Even with recent widespread public retaliation against the ruling regime, Ray Takeyh, an Iranian-American Middle East scholar and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Iran is “capable of functioning without Ali Khamenei, because in my opinion, it’s been functioning without him at least since the June war.”
On Monday, Rubio maintained that the U.S. will not intervene to put a new leader in charge of the country.
“That said, we hope that the Iranian people can overthrow this government,” he added.
The real test of whether Iran’s ruling regime has fallen will be if it responds to future protests, Takeyh said. “If these bombings inspire protests, we will see then if they respond viciously as a sign of their power.”
Takeyh then addressed accusations that the U.S. strike was unjustified.
“The justification of it is justice,” he said. “Ali Khamenei was responsible for killing scores of Americans since 1979 and other people in the region. And of course, his first and foremost victims were the Iranian people themselves.”
He continued, “There is an element of justice in the fact that he died, not in his bed, not being commemorated in parades and so forth, but in the manner that he did. This is a regime that started out by taking the American embassy hostage for 444 days and has began since then, 47 years of rampage against Americans. And this is really the first time America struck back decisively.”