Iran Threatens America: If New Sanctions Pass, US Military "Would Be At Risk"

In the coming days, president Trump is expected to announce that he will decertify the Iran Nuclear Deal, a step that potentially could cause the historic Obama-era accord to unravel. Under the 2015 deal, Iran agreed to limit its disputed nuclear program in return for the easing of economic sanctions. Realizing the dire threat that such a move presents for its economy - not to mention Iranian oil exports -  Iran has escalated the rhetoric, and overnight it warned the United States that U.S. regional military bases "would be at risk" if further sanctions were passed or if the US designated its Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) as a terrorist group.

On Friday the Financial Times reported that Donald Trump is expected to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group,  as part of a new hardline strategy against the Islamic republic.

Mr Trump is expected to announce new measures against Iran, including the prospect of additional targeted sanctions, the designation of the Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation and the adoption of a tougher stance on Iranian proxies in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, according to a person briefed on the matter. 

“It’s an integrated Iran strategy focused on neutralising and rolling back Iran’s malign activities regionally and globally,” the person said.

Iran was not happy: "The Americans should know that the Trump government’s stupid behavior with the nuclear deal will be used by the Islamic Republic as an opportunity to move ahead with its missile, regional and conventional defense program," Guards’ commander Mohammad Ali Jafari said, quoted by Reuters. He then explicitly threatened US presence in the region, warning that “if America’s new law for sanctions is passed, this country will have to move their regional bases outside the 2,000 km range of Iran’s missiles."

Jafari also said that additional sanctions would end the chances for future dialogue with the United States, and issued a stark warning to American troops.

“If the news is correct about the stupidity of the American government in considering the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist group, then the Revolutionary Guards will consider the American army to be like Islamic State all around the world particularly in the Middle East,” Jafari said according to a IRGC statement.

Iran"s Revolutionary Guards is the nations" most powerful security force. The Quds Force - the IRGC’s foreign espionage and paramilitary wing - and individuals and entities associated with the IRGC are on the US list of foreign terrorist organizations, but the organization as a whole is not, at leaset not yet. 

 

Members of the IRGC march during a military parade in Tehran September 22, 2007.

IRGC commanders have framed their military involvement in Iraq and Syria, where they are fighting to support the government of President Bashar al-Assad, as a fight against Islamic State.  For the duration of the campaign against the Islamic State, Iran has seen the Sunni Muslim militants of ISIS as an existential threat to the mostly Shi"ite Islamic Republic. Dozens of members of the Guards, including senior commanders, have been killed in Syria and Iraq.

As a reminder, on June 7, Islamic State claimed an attack on Tehran’s parliament and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, killing 18 people in one of the nation"s highest profile terrorist attacks in recent years. The Guards fired missiles at Islamic State bases in Syria on June 18 in response.

Last Thursday, Trump again accused Tehran of violating the “spirit” of the landmark nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), limiting Iran’s nuclear program for fifteen years in exchange for easing pre-existing sanctions. He also included the Islamic Republic in a list of “challenges we should’ve taken care of a long time ago,” which features North Korea, Afghanistan, and IS.

Trump has until October 15 to recertify the deal. If he chooses not to - which now appears the most likely outcome - then it will go to Congress, which will have 60 days to decide whether to re-impose sanctions on Tehran, effectively putting an end to the agreement. Trump has called the agreement the “worst deal ever negotiated,” and pledged to “dismantle” it.

Iran has repeatedly warned against violating and pulling out of the deal, as it would be harmful primarily to Washington’s own interests and jeopardize the security of the whole region. At a ceremony at Tehran University marking the start of the academic year, Iran president Rouhani said that “in the nuclear negotiations and agreement we reached issues and benefits that are not reversible. No one can turn that back, not Mr. Trump or anyone else."

Rouhani also said on Saturday that if the United States violated the deal then it would hurt its own reputation in the international community.

“If America carries out any violations today, the whole world will condemn America. They will not condemn Iran,” Rouhani said, according to state media. “Then they will say why did you trust America and sign an agreement with them."

“Even if 10 other Trumps are created in the world, these are not reversible.”

The EU has also voiced concerns over removing the nuclear agreement, which “serves the interests of all parties,” according to EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. She also stressed that the achievement in striking the long-negotiated agreement belongs to the international community, not just the US.

Meanwhile, on Sunday the IRGC navy was carrying out a military exercise on Sunday in the Gulf, an area of tension with the U.S. navy in recent months. More than 110 vessels were involved in the exercise, including some that have rocket and missile capabilities, Reuters quoted a Guards commander as saying.

Buchanan Asks "What Is America's Goal In The World?"

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

For the World War II generation there was clarity.

The attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, united the nation as it had never been before — in the conviction that Japan must be smashed, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost.

After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, however, Americans divided.

Only with the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the fall of China to Mao and Russia’s explosion of an atom bomb in 1949, and North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950, did we unite around the proposition that, for our own security, we had to go back to Europe and Asia.

What was called the Cold War consensus — that only America could “contain” Stalin’s empire — led to NATO and new U.S. alliances from the Elbe to the East China Sea.

Vietnam, however, shattered that Cold War consensus.

The far left of the Democratic Party that had taken us into Vietnam had repudiated the war by 1968, and switched sides to sympathize with such Third World communists as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and the Sandinistas.

Center-right presidents — JFK, Nixon, Reagan — accepted the need to cooperate with dictators who would side with us in fighting Communism.

And we did. Park Chung-Hee in Korea. The Shah in Iran. President Diem in Saigon. Gen. Franco in Spain. Somoza in Nicaragua. Gen. Mobuto in the Congo. Gen. Pinochet in Chile. Ferdinand Marcos in Manila. The list goes on.

Under Reagan, the Soviet Empire finally fell apart and the USSR then disintegrated in one of the epochal events of history.

The American Century had ended in America’s triumph.

Yet, after 1989, no new national consensus emerged over what ought to be our role in the World. What should we stand for? What should we fight for?

What Dean Acheson had said of our cousins in 1962: “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,” was true of us.

What was our role in the world, now that the Cold War was history?

George H.W. Bush took us to war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Soaring to 90 percent approval, he declared America’s new role was to construct a New World Order.

Those who opposed him, Bush acidly dismissed in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1991, the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor:

“We stand here today on the site of a tragedy spawned by isolationism. … And it is here we must learn — and this time avoid — the dangers of today’s isolationism and its … accomplice, protectionism.”

Neither Bush nor his New World Order survived the next November.

Then came payback for our sanctions that had brought death to thousands of Iraqis, and for the U.S. bases we had foolishly planted on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia — Sept. 11, 2001.

George W. Bush reacted by launching the two longest wars in our history, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and announced that our new role was to “end tyranny in our world.”

The Bush II crusade for global democracy also fizzled out.

Barack Obama tried to extricate us from Afghanistan and Iraq. But he, too, failed, and got us into wars in Yemen and Syria, and then started his own war in Libya, producing yet another failed state.

What does the balance sheet of post-Cold War interventions look like?

Since 1991, we have lost our global preeminence, quadrupled our national debt, and gotten ourselves mired in five Mideast wars, with the neocons clamoring for a sixth, with Iran.

With the New World Order and global democracy having been abandoned as America’s great goals, what is the new goal of U.S. foreign policy? What is the strategy to achieve it? Does anyone know?

Globalists say we should stand for a “rules-based world order.” Not exactly “Remember the Alamo!” or “Remember Pearl Harbor!”

A quarter century after the Cold War, we remain committed to 60-year-old Cold War alliances to defend scores of nations on the other side of the world. Consider some of the places where America collides today with nuclear powers: the DMZ, the Senkakus, Scarborough Shoal, Crimea, the Donbass.

What is vital to us in any of these venues to justify sending an American army to fight, or risking a nuclear war?

We have lost control of our destiny. We have lost the freedom our Founding Fathers implored us to maintain — the freedom to stay out of wars of foreign counties on faraway continents.

Like the British and French empires, the American imperium is not sustainable. We have issued so many war guarantees it is almost assured that we will be dragged into every future great crisis and conflict on the planet.

If we do not review and discard some of these war guarantees, we shall never know peace. Donald Trump once seemed to understand this. Does he still?