Parliament votes to increase funding for nation’s ballistic missile program.
TEHRAN — Chanting “Death to America,” Iran’s parliament voted unanimously Sunday to increase spending on its ballistic missile program and the foreign operations of its paramilitary Revolutionary Guards, part of a sanctions bill mirroring a new U.S. law targeting the country.
While offering hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding, the lawmakers’ bill offered a tactic as old as the slogan shouted since the 1979 Islamic Revolution — using America’s own tactics against it.
The vote salves public anger in Iran over President Trump’s constant threats to renegotiate or abandon the nuclear deal struck by world powers under his predecessor. While lawmakers stressed the bill wouldn’t violate that agreement, it ensures that those both home and abroad know Iran will continue confronting America either in the Persian Gulf or legislatively, analysts say.
“They want to show that the pressure that the U.S. is exerting on Iran, they can respond with similar measures,” said Adnan Tabatabai, an Iran analyst in Germany who is CEO of the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient. “It’s not that important that those measures may not hurt the U.S. in the same way . ... They want to show they are not just standing still and watching this happening.”
In the session Sunday, 240 lawmakers voted for the bill, with only one abstention from the 247 legislators on hand, Iran’s state-run news agency IRNA reported.
The bill now heads to an oversight committee called the Guardian Council, which is expected to approve it. Abbas Araghchi, a deputy foreign minister and senior nuclear negotiator on hand for the vote, said moderate President Hassan Rouhani’s government supported the bill.
Under terms of the bill, about $800 million will be put toward several projects, including the Defense Ministry and its intelligence agencies.
The bill also imposes financial sanctions, as well as a visa and travel ban, on U.S. military and security organizations and their commanders who have provided financial, intelligence, military, logistic and training support to terrorists in the region, naming the Islamic State group and the Syrian branch of al Qaeda. Lawmakers gave government authorities three months to give them names of people to put on a sanctions list, which will be updated every six months.