On an NRPlus conference call Friday morning, Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) expressed strong confidence that Iran was responsible for Thursday’s attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman:

I don’t think there’s any doubt. In fact, there is no doubt. First off, common sense tells you that — to run a boat out to one of these enormous vessels out in the middle of the Gulf, attach a mine to the side of it, blow a hole in it, and then be able to come back and retrieve a mine that didn’t go off in order to erase the evidence — I mean, there’s just no other force in the region with the capability to do that… There should be zero doubt in people’s minds. People can debate about what to do about it, but there should not be any debate that this was the IRGC’s Navy.

Rubio went on to suggest that the attack might be meant to influence future negotiations in favor of Iranian interests:

I think they made this decision a while back that they needed to create leverage and pressure. They’re being circled as it is. . . They’re having major troubles with their economy. And they know that eventually there’s going to have to be a negotiation involving the United States, but they want to be able to go into it from a position of strength. And so, what they have done over the years is they have developed a capability, both through the Quds Force, which is a clandestine, covert service of the IRGC, and then the standing up and propping of surrogates in the region, they have created this capability of attacking the US and attacking their adversaries in the region with a level of deniability. So it allows their foreign minister to say, “It wasn’t us,” but their adversaries know it was them. It creates pressure that they hope will give them some leverage and strength. . . going into any future negotiations, so that is what this really is about.

He said that a military response against Iran is an option, but that it is only one among many and would need to be considered carefully: