Iranian
General Locks Horns With Trump, Escalating Threat-Filled Feud
By Rick
GladstoneJuly A powerful commander in Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards Corps escalated the invective duel with President Trump on
Thursday, calling his threat against Iran’s president “cabaret-style rhetoric”
in remarks that political analysts called worrisome.
The commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani,
who wields enormous influence in Iran, may emerge as its future leader and is
considered a terrorist mastermind by the United States. He said that 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.
Donald
J. Trump
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!
5:24 AM - Jul 23, 2018
Top aides to Mr. Rouhani dismissed Mr. Trump’s
warning, apparently viewing it as an attempt by the American president to
replicate his strategy of threats against another adversary, North Korea.
But General Suleimani’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,” General Suleimani said in a speech in western
Iran reported by state-run media. “I, as a soldier, respond to you.”
Directly addressing Mr. Trump, General
Suleimani 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 American military failures in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the region,
General Suleimani 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.
General Suleimani’s words and actions are
closely scrutinized 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.
“Suleimani is directly mocking the U.S.
president, and he lambastes U.S. policy,” Mr. Kupchan said. “Suleimani is
telling Trump to watch his words, reminding him that Iran has both power across
the Middle East and potent capability for asymmetric warfare. That’s an
implicit threat against U.S. assets in the Middle East.”
A once-shadowy figure who now enjoys
celebritylike status among the hard-line conservatives in Iran, General
Suleimani 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 General
Suleimani as a vexing foe for many years. It accused him of plotting attacks on
American soldiers in Iraq after the 2003 American-led invasion that toppled
Saddam Hussein.
The Treasury Department placed him on a
sanctions blacklist in 2011, accusing the commander of complicity in what
American officials called a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington.
But the United States also has found
itself in the awkward position of cooperating with General Suleimani in Iraq,
where the Americans and Iranians have both worked to reverse gains made by the
Islamic State.
He was in the northern Iraqi city of
Tikrit in 2015, commanding Iraqi Shiite militias attempting to
recapture it from Islamic State fighters before American warplanes belatedly
joined that campaign.
#قیام_دیماه#اعتصاب #تظاهرات_سراسری #قیام سراسری #اتحاد #آزادی#ما براندازیم #آ#ايران
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