Did Israeli intelligence set the stage for Trump’s Iran strikes?

Amid criticism that Israel forced the United States to join the war on Iran, veteran journalist Eli Lake has argued that Israel presented a plan backed by intelligence inputs that President Donald Trump could not refuse. Instead of being forced into joining the war, he has argued that Israel convinced Trump with a win-win plan.

In the clearest sign that the decision to attack Iran was not entirely Trump’s, Secretary of State Marco Rubio on March 2 said the United States struck Iran as an Israeli attack on the country was imminent.

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed,” said Rubio.

Even as Trump sought to walk back Rubio’s remarks later, claiming that “I might have forced their hand” instead of the other way around, the failure to outline the goal, approach, or the status of the war even three weeks after launching the offensive has led to mounting criticism. Even right-wing media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly —who have been longtime Trump cheerleaders— thrashed the administration’s narrative.

But Lake has argued that Rubio’s words were misunderstood and criticism from the likes of Carlson and Kelly is misplaced.

In an article for Commentary, Lake said that it was not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but Israeli intelligence that persuaded Trump both tactically and strategically to launch the war on Iran.

Israel offered Trump ‘can’t-lose proposition’, convinced with track record: Lake

In his narrative, Lake said that Netanyahu placed before Trump a “can’t lost proposition”.

According to Lake, six days before the United States and Israel attacked Iran, Netanyahu provided Trump and his senior advisers with “intelligence gold” in the form of the location where Supreme Leader Ayatollah’s Khamenei and his top advisers would meet on February 28. He said the CIA confirmed the intelligence.

Previously, The New York Times has reported that it was the CIA that had zeroed in on the location and shared it with Israel.

But, as per Lake, the information originated in the Israeli intelligence community.

The result was the assassination of Khamenei and top leaders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in the opening salvo on Feb. 28th.

“Negotiations over disarming Iran were deadlocking in Geneva. So Trump seized the moment. The Iranian regime could be decapitated by hitting that February 28 meeting. And that is exactly what happened in the first strikes,” Lake noted in the article.

But Lake said that that what truly convinced Trump about the authenticity of the purported Israeli intelligence input was its previous track record that had been proven in the last year’s 12-Day War.

In the 12-Day War, Lake said that Israel claimed to have the ability not only to disable Iran’s entire air defense network, but also to take out its top military leadership — the Trump administration initially saw those inputs as too good to be true. He said that a senior adviser described Israeli inputs as “science fiction”.

But Israel achieved exactly what it promised, killing Iran’s military leadership in the opening salvo of the war.

Lake said the success and accuracy of Israeli inputs convinced Trump to bomb Iranian nuclear sites at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, in Operation Midnight Hammer, and it was that confidence in Israel’s intelligence and operational capabilities that drove the decision to launch Operation Epic Fury last month.