Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chairman, does not believe the United States should remove Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the list of known terrorist organizations.
The chairman’s comments, which came Thursday during a hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, follow reports that the Biden administration was considering such a move because it has remained a key sticking point in the negotiations to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement, which was later abandoned by the Trump administration in 2018.
“In my personal opinion, I believe the IRGC Quds Force to be a terrorist organization, and I do not support them being de-listed from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list,” he explained.
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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who also testified alongside Milley, declined to provide his personal opinion on the matter.
President Joe Biden’s push to reenter an agreement similar to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which intended to cap Iran’s nuclear activity in exchange for a rollback of international sanctions, has sparked bipartisan concerns.
The Guard “is a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of people, including Americans,” reads a joint statement from Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid last month, days after Axios reported that the administration is considering making the change in designation, though the State Department told the outlet that no decision had been made, and “any speculation to the contrary is simply uninformed.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “time is getting extremely short,” in a Tuesday interview on MSNBC, adding that he’s “not overly optimistic at the prospects of actually getting an agreement to a conclusion, despite all the efforts we put into it and despite the fact that I believe we would be — our security would be better off.”
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Andrea Mitchell, the host conducting the interview, pressed the secretary as to whether the Guard would continue to be considered a terrorist organization, and he declined to answer, saying he’s “not going to get into the details of where we are on the negotiations.”
Also, on Tuesday, House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Michael McCaul told reporters that lawmakers intend to file a discharge petition to force a resolution of disapproval of the Biden administration’s plan to revive the Iran nuclear deal.
