Marco Rubio and Iran policy is John Kiriakou’s answer to a viewer who asked who was actually driving Iran policy in the administration, and whether there was any coherent interagency process behind it.
Kiriakou called it “a great question” and “quite an important question,” and answered it by describing the machinery first.[1]
The normal process
“In a normal situation, there are two bodies called the Principals Committee and the Deputies Committee.” The senior body is chaired at the top: “The Principals Committee is chaired by the President, and it includes the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, the um Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Director of the CIA.”[1][2]
The junior body mirrors it: “The Deputies Committee is the number twos for all those people. It’s chaired by the Vice President.” In the ordinary course, “this policy would be coming out of the the National Security Council.”[2]
Kiriakou has direct experience of the senior body: he was George Tenet’s note taker at the Principals Committee meeting held the night before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[3]
The anomaly
What made 2026 different, in his account, was that one man held two of the seats. “In this odd scenario that we’re in right now, Marco Rubio is both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. And so, this is Marco Rubio’s policy.”[2]
The elimination
Kiriakou then reaches the same conclusion a second way, by removing everyone reported to have opposed the war. “We We learned from the the this leak from the White House last week that J.D. Vance was opposed to an attack on Iran. Tulsi Gabbard was opposed to an attack on Iran, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs came out and said that he was opposed to an attack on Iran. Who does that leave? Marco Rubio. That’s it. Marco Rubio is running this policy.”[2][4]
The only name he adds to Rubio’s is not American: “Yeah, and Bibi Netanyahu.” That pairing matches his separate account that it was Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman who asked Donald Trump for the attack in the first place.[4]
Whether Rubio’s account is believed
Rubio’s public justification for American entry into the 2026 war was that Israel had told Washington in advance that it intended to attack Iran, and had warned that Iranian retaliation would fall on American troops in the region — from which it followed that the United States had to join the attack.
Asked directly whether he believed the story, Kiriakou did not: “I’m not sure I do.” He read it as positioning rather than explanation — “I think that’s just an effort to make him look like or make us look like the good guys” — and set against it a flat statement that no justification existed: “I mean, the truth is there’s no legal justification here.”[5]
What he found genuinely novel was the press. Outlets that would ordinarily have been cheerleading, “like they did in 2003,” were instead “getting experts to come on and say, ‘Yeah, there’s no justification. This is illegal.’” He connected the shift to the war’s unpopularity, noting that only one voter in four supported it.[5]