Chief commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Major General Hossein Salami (Photo by Tasnim News Agency)
Tehran, July 26 (RHC)-- The chief commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) says the United States has brought nothing to various nations across the globe, but poverty and backwardness and pillage of their riches.
“America has brought nothing to nations of the world but poverty and backwardness and plundering of their wealth,” Major General Hossein Salami said while addressing a ceremony held in the western Iranian province of Kermanshah on Monday.
“The U.S. has no credit in the eyes of the Iranians and we [in the IRGC] are ready to lay down our lives in the service of the Iranian nation,” he added. The commander said: "No nation would attain power and development without fighting for them and in the absence of resistance against enemies, the society would lose its dignity, security and power."
The top IRGC commander said enemies have realized that they cannot defeat the Iranian nation through hard war and have resorted to other plots, including economic sanctions. “Through imposing the sanctions and mounting economic pressures, [the enemies] want to draw a wedge between this [Islamic] establishment and the nation ... but they must know that although economic sanctions put pressure on the nation, but they will end with the Islamic Iran emerging as the final winner,” General Salami said.
He noted that Iran's enemies, topped by the US, have hatched all kinds of plots against the country and used all kinds of assassinations, sanctions and threats, "but our nation has never stood still and has continued on its past with more rigor."
In May 2018, former U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from a UN-endorsed nuclear deal, which it had signed as a member of the P5+1 group with Tehran in 2015, and unleashed a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran.
In response, Iran announced remedial measures, scaling back some of its commitments under the deal, while maintaining that the moves were "reversible" depending on the actions of the other signatories.
The U.S. special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, has admitted that the maximum pressure campaign pushed by Trump's administration against the Islamic Republic “failed miserably” and “hurt U.S. interests.” Speaking on a television show hosted by MSNBC journalist Mehdi Hasan, Malley said Iran’s nuclear program accelerated only after the former U.S. president launched his maximum pressure campaign.
