Iran dismisses Trump war rant
Top general claims US ‘won’t dare’ take military action
PRESIDENT Donald Trump, in a tweet in capital letters late on Sunday night, warned Iranian President Hassan Rouhani that if Iran threatened the US again, it would face severe consequences. Trump’s message came as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the US would step up broadcasts into Iran critical of the country’s theocratic rulers.
“To Iranian President Rouhani: Never, ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before. We are no longer a country that will stand for your demented words of violence & death. Be cautious!” Trump tweeted in capital letters.
Iran’s state-owned Islamic Republic News Agency replied within hours, dismissing Trump’s tweet and describing it as a “passive reaction” to Rouhani’s remarks.
Earlier on Sunday, Rouhani said the US should avoid inciting Iranians against the government as the Trump administration was poised to reimpose sanctions suspended under the 2015 nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew in May.
“America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars,” Rouhani told a meeting of Iranian diplomats, according to IRNA.
“You are not in a position to incite the Iranian nation against Iran’s security and interests.”
General Gholam Hossein Gheibparvar, head of the Revolutionary Guard’s paramilitary Basij force, said the US “won’t dare” take military action against Iran, whose missiles can hit most of the Middle East. Iran also controls part of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passageway for all of the Persian Gulf oil tanker traffic.
The escalation of bellicose rhetoric comes just three weeks before the first round of banking sanctions suspended under the nuclear deal is reimposed.
Bigger sanctions, which will take effect in November, are aimed at cutting off virtually all of Iran’s oil market.
Pompeo on Sunday launched a harsh attack on Iran’s clerical and military rulers, calling them a kleptocracy akin to the Mafia. “The level of corruption and wealth among regime leaders shows that Iran is run by something that resembles the Mafia more than a government,” he said in a speech made to a largely Iranian American audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
Pompeo was introduced by Fred Ryan, publisher of The Washington Post and chair of the Ronald Reagan Foundation.
Pompeo said the administration had concluded that Tehran had no statesmen willing to moderate its policies, a sharp break from the Obama administration, which negotiated the nuclear deal hoping an improving economy would give relative pragmatists like Rouhani a boost.
But Pompeo said Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif were “merely polished front men for the Ayatollah’s international con artistry. Their nuclear deal didn’t make them moderates, it made them wolves in sheep’s clothing”.
He stopped short of calling for regime change, but announced stepped-up US government broadcasting in Farsi that is likely to foment further unrest against the government.
He said the US Broadcasting Board of Governors was taking steps to circumvent internet censorship in Iran, and creating a round-the-clock Farsi channel across television, radio, digital and social media formats, “so that ordinary Iranians inside Iran and around the globe will know that America stands with them”.