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U.S Official: Iran Planned to Preemptively Launch Missiles, U.S. Was Forced to Act
(Times of Israel) Jacob Magid - President Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury against Iran after Washington received intelligence indicating that the Islamic Republic would deploy its ballistic missiles either preemptively or simultaneously with any American action against Tehran, a senior U.S. official said Saturday. "The president decided he was not going to sit back and allow American forces in the region to absorb attacks from conventional missiles," he said. "We had analysis that basically told us if we sat back and waited to get hit first, the amount of casualties and damage would be substantially higher than if we acted in a preemptive, defensive way to prevent those launches from occurring." "We cannot continue to live in a world where these people not only possess missiles but the ability to make 100 of them a month in perpetuity, to overwhelm any potential defenses. We are not going to be held hostage by them, and we are not going to let them hit us first because it would have substantially increased the risk to our troops in the region and to our allies." The official asserted that Tehran demonstrated "no seriousness" to achieve a real deal in the last three rounds of nuclear talks, accusing Iran of trying to "buy time," rather than negotiating in good faith. "They were in the throes of rebuilding everything that had been destroyed" in the U.S. and Israeli strikes last June. "Israel did not drag the U.S. into Operation Epic Fury. President Trump acted out of the national interest of the United States. Any claim to the contrary by a desperate and floundering Iran is false."