European oil sanctions against Iran began Sunday, but the Iranian regime met them with defiance and threats against the West.
“Our doctrine of threat against threat mandates that any confrontation will be responded to by a greater attack, and we are ready for it,” Brig. Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, the deputy head of Iran’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an speech marking the anniversary of the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner on July 3, 1988.
The guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes mistook Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian jetliner, for a fighter plane in the heat of confrontation with Iran over the Iran-Iraq war. All 290 passengers, including 66 children, died in that incident.
“There is a possibility that America will commit the same heinous crime (as it did in 1988), but this time the response will be harsh where we will make them regret their act,” Jazayeri said, according to Sepah News, the official media outlet of the Revolutionary Guards.
The only way to avoid such retaliation again is for America to leave the region, Jazayeri said. “Only then will it be safe.”
Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the author of the award winning book “A Time to Betray.” He is a senior Fellow with EMPact America, a member of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and teaches at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA).
