In an exclusive interview with Drop Site News, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Esmail Baghaei rejected President Donald Trump’s claim that he launched the war because Iran was “going to attack first,” calling it a “big lie.”
“There was no intention on the part of Iran to attack the United States,” he said. “They claim that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,” Baghaei added. “Did we come to the Gulf of Mexico to target Los Angeles and other U.S. cities? Or did they come 6,500 miles away to Iranian shores?”
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the U.S. decided to preemptively attack Iran because the White House knew Israel was going to begin bombing Iran and that Iran would strike back. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
On Tuesday, Trump sought to recast the U.S. rationale and said that he believed Iran was going to launch an attack first. “They were going to attack if we didn’t do it. They were going to attack first—I felt strongly about that,” Trump said, charging that the Iranians “were getting ready to attack Israel. They were gonna attack others.”
Rubio subsequently tried to walk his initial remarks back, saying that the media had mischaracterized his comments and—regardless of whether Israel was going to strike—Trump had already made a decision to attack Iran’s ballistic missile capability and go to war. “We are not going to put American troops in harm’s way,” Rubio said. “If you tell the president of the United States that if we don’t go first, we’re going to have more people killed and more people injured, the president’s going to go first. That’s what he did.”
Baghaei called all of these claims by U.S. officials, “Lies after lies.”
“I think the American people deserve to know, to understand what their government is doing,” Baghaie, who is also the spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said. “How their government is abusing their money, their tax money, their image in the Middle East, in the Islamic world, just in furtherance of the whims of Benjamin Netanyahu, who is by the way, wanted by the ICC [International Criminal Court], who is a genocidal killer in Palestine.”
Baghaei denied claims by some U.S. officials, including Trump, that Iran had asked to resume talks with the U.S. “They are killing our citizens. Municipalities, schools, hospitals, medical centers, sports clubs—everywhere is being bombarded and targeted by missiles by [the] Israeli and American war machine. Do you think any Iranian with common sense would be really in a position to reach out to the United States under these circumstances?” Baghaei asked. “We were negotiating with the United States,” he said, pointing out that another round of talks was scheduled for Monday, March 2. “Just two days before that, the United States and Israel attacked Iran,” he added. “We were betrayed. Diplomacy was betrayed.”
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The Gulf Arab states that host U.S. military facilities have been targeted by barrages of Iranian retaliatory strikes. Satellite imagery and recent news reports suggest that billions of dollars of sensitive U.S. reconnaissance equipment have been destroyed or damaged during these attacks. The CIA station in Saudi Arabia and U.S. embassies have also been hit, while six U.S. servicemembers were killed in missile strikes on a makeshift operations center at a civilian port in Kuwait.
Gulf Arab states have universally condemned Iran for its strikes on civilian airports and hotels they say are not related to the U.S.-Israeli war. Along with attacks on maritime shipping, oil and gas production facilities in multiple states have also been struck during the fighting in attacks that have already led to a disruption of global energy flows.
Baghaei stated that Iran’s attacks in the Gulf were retaliatory due to the presence of U.S. troops organizing the war based in these countries, in some cases while reportedly embedded in civilian infrastructure like commercial hotels.
“Iran is surrounded by American military bases across the region. And they are using those bases for logistics, for preparation and for conducting this act of aggression against Iran. And under international law, Iran is entitled to defend itself. We are entitled to target the origin of those attacks against Iran,” Baghaei said. He disputed the characterization of Iran as the aggressor and emphatically denied Tehran is intentionally targeting oil infrastructure or civilian sites in the Gulf. “Our armed forces, they attack only those installations, those military bases that are being used, or in fact abused, by the United States to attack Iran.”
Baghaei also claimed Israel was engaging in “false flag” attacks in the Gulf in an effort to further draw Arab nations into the war against Iran. “Israel has already used this during the past eight decades in many cases,” he said. He also referenced Tucker Carlson’s recent claim that Saudi Arabia and Qatar recently arrested Mossad agents plotting to bomb sites in those countries. “Right now, the situation is very complicated and the probability, the likelihood of abuse by such actors is very high,” he said. “During a situation of war, other actors may abuse the situation.” Majed Al-Ansari, spokesperson for the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Tuesday that there is currently “no information” about alleged Mossad cells operating inside Qatar. Iran has not produced any evidence that Israel has been responsible for any of the recent attacks inside Arab countries.
Amid claims by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. and Israel have been systematically killing any potential successors to the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated on Saturday in the opening attack of the war, Baghaei said that Iran will soon announce a new Supreme Leader. “The process is going on in accordance with the constitution. Right now we have an interim leadership council that is charged with governing the everyday affairs of the state. The Supreme Leader should be elected quite soon, but until then this interim council is in charge of the state,” he said.
On Tuesday, the Israeli military struck the offices of the Assembly of Experts in the Iranian city of Qom—the body tasked with electing a new Supreme Leader. Israeli sources also claimed that they had struck the building while dozens of assembly members were holding a vote for Khamenei’s replacement.
Baghaei did not provide any details on the Qom strike. Asked about the bombing another senior Iranian official told Drop Site that Iran denied Israeli claims that council members charged with electing the new leader were killed in that strike while meeting. “The original report was not accurate. In reality, one of their buildings located in the city of Qom was targeted. Some administrative staff members who were inside were martyred, but the Assembly of Experts main meeting was not being held at that time,” the official said.
Trump has reportedly been speaking to Kurdish leaders in the region, and CNN and other media outlets have reported that the CIA has been working to arm and support Kurdish forces to potentially be used in ground operations as part of a regime change campaign. The U.S. and Israel have also been attacking domestic security forces in Iran, the police, and paramilitary Basij units as part of what has been described as a precursor to fomenting or encouraging domestic uprisings and civil disorder inside of Iran.
“If you see the pattern of their behavior, the United States and Israel during the past three or four decades, they love to create failed states. They love to create bloodshed. They [have] so much appetite for turning the states into chaos,” Baghaei said. He charged that this was part of a U.S.-Israeli plan for “regime change,” saying, “At the end of the day they do not care about the human rights of the Iranians. Because if they cared even a bit, they would not target innocent girls in their school.”
Baghaei also disputed the recent characterizations offered by Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff that Iran was days away from obtaining “weapons grade bomb making material,” calling it, “Absolutely false. That’s simply a big lie.”
In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Witkoff also claimed that Iranian negotiators boasted that they had enough enriched uranium to make 11 nuclear bombs. “They were proud of it,” Witkoff said. “They were proud that they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.”
Baghaei pointed to statements made by the Omani mediator that Iran was showing flexibility and that a deal was within reach. “We negotiated in all good faith, in all seriousness in Geneva,” Baghaei said.
MS NOW reported that a Persian Gulf diplomat also disputed Witkoff’s characterization of Iran’s negotiating position and the alleged comments about boasting that it had enough enriched uranium to make 11 bombs. “I can categorically state that this is inaccurate,” said the diplomat, referring to Witkoff’s account, saying that it was a mischaracterization of Iran’s efforts to offer an overview of the materials it was willing to give up as part of a deal.
As to whether there will be a diplomatic solution between the U.S. and the current Iranian government, Baghaei again returned to the Trump administration using the “pretext” of negotiations as a tool of war. “I think this is an existential war because this is what they have imposed on Iran for the past two years. We tried our best. We tried to remove all the excuses that they provided,” he said.
Baghaei invoked the decades of U.S. interference in Iran that began with the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. “Now we are in the middle of a historic moment and I think the United States administration, instead of trying to somehow take care of the old wound that they created in 1953, they are recreating that,” he said.“They are reminding Iranians of the betrayal of 1953 when they tried to plant a dictatorship in Iran. Right now, they are repeating the same.”
