Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s deadline for imposing “snap back” of UN sanctions on Iran comes in four days, but it still remains to be seen whether any members of the UN Security Council will honor it, especially as 13 out of 15 members already rejected it last month. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in remarks to his cabinet this morning, has already declared victory over Pompeo. Rouhani said the U.S. government is going to suffer another defeat at the UNSC after its recent failure to extend the UN arms embargo on Iran, reported Tasnim. He said Washington’s upcoming failure to activate the snapback mechanism of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action would mark another major and historic victory for the Iranian nation.
At the same time, Iran is escalating a war of words with the U.S. over a Sept. 13 report in Politico which claimed, citing unnamed intelligence sources, that Iran was considering assassinating the U.S. ambassador in South Africa as retaliation for the Jan. 3 U.S. assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. “Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!” Trump tweeted in response to the Politico report. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in a Twitter posting, called Pompeo a “habitual liar” who is trying to drag Trump into “mother of all quagmires.”
“The habitual liar bamboozled @realdonaldtrump into assassinating ISIS’ enemy #1 by raising a false alarm. Now he’s trying to sucker him into mother of all quagmires by leaking a new false alarm. -Politico source: ‘US officials’ -Trump source: ‘press reports’ Time to wake up,” Zarif tweeted late on Tuesday (Sept. 15). To double down on his assertion that the U.S. secretary of state was a liar, Zarif also attached to his tweet the photo of Pompeo, a former CIA director, who admitted to an audience last year that the American spy agency trained employees to “lie, cheat and steal.”
