Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to the supreme leader on international affairs, last week stressed that the Islamic movements in the region require Iran to be directly involved. “No other country has this kind of power and capacity,” he said in an interview.
Calling Syria the golden ring in the fight against Israel, Velayati said, “Today Russia and America, for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, are at a point of confrontation, and we are witnessing the preliminary start of a cold war between world powers, with Russia and China on one side, and America, England and France on the other. This cold war will start from the Middle East and Syria.”
Addressing the nuclear issue, Velayati said, “The nuclear technology is the most advanced technology in the world. … Whoever has this technology has the upper hand. … Our advancement in the field of nuclear technology and other fields is growing.”
Velayati, who served as the Islamic regime’s foreign minister from 1981 to 1997, is wanted along with six other Iranian officials by the courts in Argentina for the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.
The regime’s current defense minister, Ahmad Vahidi, who oversees Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, has been flagged by Interpol for that crime.
Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards 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).
