WASHINGTON, March 2. /TASS/. Pentagon officials acknowledged in briefings with Congress that there was no intelligence about Iran planning to attack US troops in the Middle East first, Reuters reported, citing people familiar.

According to them, in Sunday’s briefings that lasted for more than 90 minutes, US administration officials told Senate and House of Representatives staff that Iran’s ballistic missiles and "proxy forces" in the region posed a threat to US interests, Reuters said, while Washington had no intelligence suggesting that Iran planned to attack US forces first, as US President Donald Trump claimed earlier.

Politico, too, confirmed the briefings were held. "Whatever imminent threat they’re posing was likely in reaction to our unprecedented military buildup in the region <…>. This is an example of the president deciding what he wanted to do, and then making his administration go and find whatever argument they could make to justify it," the publication quoted a senator, Democrat Andy Kim, as saying.

According to Politico, the Pentagon held the first briefings on the situation in the Middle East nearly 36 hours after the US launched military strikes. Prior to that, a senior US administration official told reporters that American troops would have suffered far more casualties by waiting for an impending Iranian strike. Besides, unlike his predecessors, US President Donald Trump made little effort to ensure support from Congress, the American people or the United States’ allies, Politico added.

On February 28, the US and Israel launched a military operation against Iran. Major Iranian cities, including Tehran, have been hit. The White House justified the attack by citing alleged missile and nuclear threats from Iran. At that, the US leadership openly called on the Iranian people to rise against their own government and take power. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and some other key leaders of the Islamic Republic were killed in the joint US-Israeli attack. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Iranian Armed Forces’ elite unit, announced a large-scale retaliatory operation.