February 07-2014
. . . different strokes from different folks
The foreign minister is trying to tamp down the war rhetoric coming out of Iran, while the Number Two officer in the Pasdaran is busily ramping it up.
Speaking Monday to the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif proclaimed: “We will not start a military operation against anyone—I say: against anyone.”
It was clearly an effort to put down the frequent talk that Iran wants a war to wipe out Israel. But Zarif couldn’t say the word “Israel” without facing trouble back home, so he used an indirect reference and hoped his German audience would understand.
Iran, however, has never threatened a war against Israel. Its standard line, first used almost a quarter-century ago by Ayatollah Khomeini, states that Israel “must be eliminated from the pages of time” or in the freer translation used most often by the government of Iran: “must be wiped off the map.”
The phrase is always used in the passive voice, leaving open to the imagination who might do the eliminating. The result is that a poll would probably show that most people around the world think Iran has said it would do the eliminating, although Iran has been very careful not to say that and to leave everything very vague.
Zarif was trying to change that perception.
But while Zarif was trying to tamp down war talk, Brig. Gen. Hossain Salami, the deputy commander of the Pasdaran, was ramping it up by threatening to bomb the United States itself if the US ever attacked Iran.
The Islamic Republic has long threatened to attack US interests and bases in the Middle East, but Salami was believed to be the first Iranian official to extend the threat to the United States itself.
Salimi said that if the Americans ever attacked Iran, the Islamic Republic “will recognize no boundary for its response.”
He added, “We have identified those areas that would shock the United States and we have full dominance over the enemy’s vital interests.”
It did not appear that the expanded threat was taken seriously and it drew little if any news coverage outside Iran. It is widely accepted that Iran knows full well that any attack launched inside the United States would result in a full-scale war, as did the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Salami was responding to a passing remark last month by US Secretary of State John Kerry saying the US military options would still be on the table “if Iran does not live up to its nuclear commitments under the Geneva deal.”
Iran had previously said many times that it would answer an American attack on Iran by targeting the 32 US bases in the Middle East. That number has been repeated ad infinitum although, with the US withdrawal from Iraq, all the bases there have been closed.