TEHRAN -- The top commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says Iran has managed to wear down the enemy and deprive it of the so-called military option against the country.
Major General Hussein Salami, during his visit to the southwestern Ilam province on Thursday, said the military option against Iran is off the table, as the country has become too powerful to fall victim to foreign aggression.
“The Leader’s vision was to wear down and undermine the enemy and this craft blocked the enemy’s approach and removed every option from the enemy’s table,” he said in a speech, referring to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.
He stressed that the enemy has instead resorted to economic warfare and sanctions against Iran.
“The Islamic, Revolutionary Iran of today is powerful and any enemy knows that this territory is not occupiable…and now they have resorted to economic war and sanctions,” the top commander said.
His remarks came amid the seventh round of talks between Iran and the remaining parties to the 2015 nuclear deal in Vienna, aimed at the removal of cruel and draconian sanctions on Iran.
In recent weeks, the U.S. has threatened to consider “all options” if the talks in Vienna fail. The occupying regime of Israel has threatened Iran with war, irrespective of the outcome of talks in Vienna.
Observers, however, have dismissed the threats as empty rhetoric, smacking of desperation.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the top Iranian general noted that the Iranian nation is aware of the enemy’s conspiracies and will not fall prey to its wicked designs.
“You want our people to go hungry and you have blockaded their lifeline, yet you issue happy Nowruz messages to the Iranian nation,” he said. “Do you think the nation does not know you?”
General Salami’s remarks were in reference to the statement issued by the former U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, in 2018, wherein he threatened to starve the Iranian people.
Iranian officials must listen to the U.S. “if they want their people to eat,” Pompeo was quoted as saying in an interview in November 2018.
General Salami acknowledged Iran’s economic problems, but pointed out that the American people are also grappling with many predicaments.
He censured the U.S. government for the high percentage of homeless people in the country, a crippled healthcare system, and banks’ expropriation of people’s homes under rampant foreclosures.
“You are a system whose police expropriate the houses of the poor and we are a system that builds houses for the poor. We build so many that no one would be rendered homeless,” he added.

‘Americans Must Leave Or Else’

The commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) also said the Americans must leave the region with humiliation or will be forced to flee under conditions worse than what they experienced in Afghanistan.
“As already said, we once again tell the Americans that you should leave the geographical region around us ... taking with you the humiliation you are facing; otherwise, you will be expelled in a way much worse than Afghanistan and you will be forced to flee,” Brigadier General Esmail Qa’ani said in Shiraz on Thursday.
“This is your inevitable fate,” Qa’ani noted. “You should know that gone is the time when you did whatsoever you wished; the time of hit-and-run strikes is over and if you hit, you will have to wait and receive the response in the harshest way possible.”
The IRGC commander said after 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan, the Americans had no choice, but to concede to negotiations and even then, they committed crimes and acts of treachery during the negotiations, and created problems for the Afghan people.
“The Americans established a government in Afghanistan in a matter of 20 years, and created a government that could not resist for 20 days and they even failed to fly their own people out of the Kabul airport,” Qa’ani said.
Afghanistan was the “biggest defeat” for the Americans in the last century, the senior Iranian commander said. “After the Americans... suffered defeat in Afghanistan last year, they raised many marginal and secondary issues so that the world would not realize what disgrace they experienced there.”