Top Iranian general locks horns with Trump
Threat-filled feud keeps escalating
NEW YORK: A powerful commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps escalated the invective duel with President Donald Trump on Thursday, calling his threat against Iran’s president “cabaret-style rhetoric” in remarks that political analysts called worrisome.
The commander, Maj Gen Qassem Soleimani, who wields enormous influence in Iran, may emerge as its future leader and is considered a terrorist mastermind by the United States. He said Mr Trump should pick a fight directly with him and not Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani.
In a Twitter message on Sunday posted in all-capital letters, Mr Trump warned Mr Rouhani that he would suffer “consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before” if he threatened the United States.
Top aides to Mr Rouhani dismissed Mr Trump’s warning, apparently viewing it as an attempt by the US president to replicate his strategy of threats against another adversary, North Korea.
But Maj Gen Soleimani’s public challenge to Mr Trump appeared to signal that the Iranian hierarchy felt obliged to send a more assertive reply.
“It is beneath the dignity of our president to respond to you,” Maj Gen Soleimani said in a speech in western Iran reported by state-run media. “I, as a soldier, respond to you.”
Directly addressing Mr Trump, Maj Gen Soleimani said: “You threaten us with an action that is ‘unprecedented’ in the world. This is cabaret-style rhetoric. Only a cabaret owner talks to the world this way.”
Deriding what he described as the history of US military failures in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the region, Maj Gen Soleimani said Mr Trump was in no position to issue threats to Iran.
“We are near you, where you can’t even imagine,” he said. “We are ready. We are the man of this arena.”
While the possibility of a war between Iran and the United States is considered extremely low, political analysts worry that escalating threats could lead to something more serious.
Maj Gen Soleimani’s words and actions are closely scrutinised because he is regarded as one of Iran’s most cunning and autonomous military figures, in charge of its intelligence gathering and covert military operations.
“His fire-breathing retort to Trump is important and worrisome,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy in Washington.
“Soleimani is directly mocking the US president, and he lambasts US policy,” Mr Kupchan said. “Soleimani is telling Trump to watch his words, reminding him that Iran has both power across the Middle East and capability for asymmetric warfare. That’s an implicit threat against US assets in the Middle East.”
A once-shadowy figure who now enjoys celebrity-like status among the hard-line conservatives in Iran, Maj Gen Soleimani leads the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, a special forces unit responsible for Iranian operations outside Iran’s borders. Quds is the Persian word for Jerusalem.
The general is known to have the personal backing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and is believed to be the chief strategist behind Iran’s military ventures and influence in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the region and beyond.
The United States has regarded Maj Gen Soleimani as a vexing foe for many years. It accused him of plotting attacks on US soldiers in Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion. The Treasury Department placed him on a sanctions blacklist in 2011, accusing him of complicity in what US officials called a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington.
But the US has found itself in the awkward position of cooperating with Maj Gen Soleimani in Iraq.