Senior US official: Trump had no choice but to act amid intel that Iran planned to preemptively use missiles

US President Donald 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 US official says.

“The president decided he was not going to sit back and allow American forces in the region to absorb attacks from conventional missiles,” the senior US official says in a briefing with reporters.

“We had analysis that basically told us [that] 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,” the senior US official claims.

“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,” the US official continues.

“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,” he adds.

The senior US official says the Trump administration viewed Iran’s “ambition” of nuclear weapons as a longer-term threat and Tehran’s existing stockpile of missiles that can reach US military bases across the region as a “short-term” threat posing “an intolerable risk to the US.”