Marco Rubio

I'm genuinely asking.

In between meetings on Capitol Hill, Secretary Rubio offered a brief update about the incident in Dubai.

Since the Trump administration launched the war against Iran, the State Department has evacuated non-essential personnel from many more embassies and consulates and is now organizing evacuation flights for private Americans.

Rubio is urging Americans to call a hotline if they need help.

Michelle Kellerman, NPR News, the State Department.

Finally, we honor one more American soldier, a fallen warrior of world, of wars, and really, a really terror.

Absolutely was an imminent threat.

And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us.

And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.

Because the Department of War assessed that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked and by someone else, Israel attacked them, they hit us first and 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 that this was going to happen and we didn't act preemptively to prevent more casualties and more loss of life.

The second question that's been asked is, why now?

Well, there's two reasons why now.

The first is it was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States.

The orders had been delegated down to the field commanders.

It was automatic.

And in fact, it bared to be true because in fact, the...

Within an hour of the initial attack on the leadership compound, the missile forces in the south and in the north, for that matter, had already been activated to launch.

In fact, those had already been pre-positioned.