WASHINGTON: The United States has said that while it will continue to expose Iran’s activities in the Middle East, it has no plan to launch a military offensive to counter those activities.
“Not
militarily right now, no,” US Defence Secretary James Mattis said at an
impromptu news conference at the Pentagon on Friday afternoon when
asked if Washington could respond to those activities militarily.
On
Thursday, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley launched a
media offensive against Iran, highlighting its alleged subversive
activities in the Middle East and its illegal arms programme.
Ambassador
Haley stood in front of an Iranian missile that the Houthi rebels
allegedly fired at Riyadh International Airport in Saudi Arabia. The
missile didn’t hit the airport, but she said that if it had, the missile
potentially could have killed hundreds of innocent civilians.
Referring
to the decision to use a US military — Anacostia-Bolling — for
Ambassador Haley’s briefing, a journalist asked Secretary Mattis if
this’s a back-up for a future a military action against Iran.
“No,
the reason Ambassador Haley was there, and not one of our generals, is
this is a diplomatically led effort to expose to the world what Iran is
up to,” he said.
Secretary Mattis claimed that Ambassador
Haley also shared with the media physical evidence to support her claim
Iran is providing ballistic missiles to the Houthis.
“What
we are doing in that region,” he added, “is standing by allies and
partners, and we’re on one hand exposing, on the other hand helping them
build their own capability to reject Iranian influence.”
In
addition to its support the Houthis in Yemen, Iran was supporting
similar non-state actors in other parts of the Middle East, the US
defence secretary said.
“We find Iran actively engaged in
keeping [Syrian President Bashar] Assad in power, despite the murder
of his own people on the industrial scale, including the use of chemical
weapons,” Mr Mattis said. “We see what [Iran has] done with Lebanese
Hezbollah in Lebanon and the threat to peace and the support they’ve
given to Assad and the threat to Israel, for example.”
Depicting
Iran as the source of all troubles in the Middle East, he said:
“Everywhere you find turmoil, you find Iran’s hand in it.”
The
Trump administration is also trying to undo a 2015 nuclear deal with
Iran with claims that Tehran is violating the agreement while the United
States and other Western nations have kept their part of the pledge by
relaxing economic and diplomatic sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
But on Friday, both Japan and Russia, which is also one of the parties to the deal, refused to endorse the US claim.
Japanese
Foreign Minister Taro Kono told reporters at the UN headquarters in New
York that Japan continues to support the 2015 nuclear agreement with
Iran, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). “So
far we have not confirmed any violation (of the deal) by Iran,” he
added.
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
said at the Russian parliament on Friday that a possible breakdown of
the nuclear deal would send a wrong signal and complicate efforts to
persuade North Korea to stop testing nuclear weapons.
China,
France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States signed the
deal with Iran in July 2015, promising to lift US and EU economic
sanctions on Tehran. In effect since January 2016, the deal stipulates
the gradual lifting of the economic and diplomatic sanctions on Iran in
exchange for assurances that Tehran will give up efforts to make a
nuclear weapon.
