Reuters misses the real news here with its headline, which reads, "Iran warns U.S. against imposing further sanctions." It rather begs the question: What did they threaten to do?
It's really not too ambiguous:
Iran warned the United States against designating its Revolutionary Guards Corp as a terrorist group and said U.S. regional military bases would be at risk if further sanctions were passed.
The warning came after the White House said on Friday that President Donald Trump would announce new U.S. responses to Iran’s missile tests, support for “terrorism” and cyber operations as part of his new Iran strategy.
“As we’ve announced in the past, 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,” Guards’ commander Mohammad Ali Jafari said, according to state media.
Jafari also said that additional sanctions would end the chances for future dialogue with the United States, according to state media, 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.
Now you could argue that this is possibly bluster, and it's possible that it is. But as is usually the case when it comes to Iran, the American left insists on refusing to take the mad mullahs at their word when they threaten to harm us or our allies. How many times has Iran threatened to wipe Israel off the map? Yet we sit back and let them develop the very weapons that would make it possible for them to do so, and insist that there's no possible way they're irrational enough to actually use the weapons they're building for the reason they've said they're building them.
Supposedly some in the Trump cabinet favor staying in the nuclear deal with Iran, at least for now, because exiting it would prompt yet another international crisis when we've already got our hands full with the one involving North Korea.
Yet why do we have that situation with North Korea? We have it for precisely the same reason we're now looking at another one with Iran. For decades it's been clear that both regimes represented threats, and that their pursuit of nuclear weapons is the threat in its practical form. Our response? Negotiate worthless agreements and impose toothless measures that allow you to claim you did something, all while the rogue regime continues its nuclear work unabated in the slightest.
We should never have lifted the sanctions on Iran in the first place, as the Iranians did absolutely nothing to earn the relief. But that's what happens, America, when you elect a president determined to make nice with bad actors without any regard whatsoever for the strategic interests of the United States. Trump is now stuck with the consequences of Obama's foolishness, and no one should be surprised that Iran is making threats in the hope it can prevent the U.S. from reimposing sanctions.
I have an idea: Skip the sanctions and order a military strike to take out all of Iran's weapon facilities. And if we think something might be a weapon facility, but we're not sure? Destroy it anyway. That's what you get for threatening the United States.
