An Iranian diplomat in New York vowed that Tehran would “take revenge” on the United States for killing Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
“We have to take revenge,” Majid Takht-Ravanchi, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, said during a televised interview Monday evening. “When that would happen, how that would happen, where that would happen, that remains to be seen in the future.”
That pledge echoed threats leveled by Soleimani’s associates in Tehran in recent days, but the U.S. government’s role as the host of the U.N. meant that the latest threat was delivered from New York City. President Trump’s administration maintains that the airstrike against Soleimani should deter future threats by demonstrating the high costs of attacks on the U.S., but Iranian officials have taken a belligerent line in recent days.
“I’m not going to elaborate on the steps that Iran will take, but, in general terms, there will be revenge against the killing of Gen. Soleimani,” Takht-Ravanchi said.
The ambassador’s remarks are all the more unusual given that Iran and the U.S. do not have diplomatic relations, so he is the senior Iranian envoy in the country. The formal ties between the two countries were ended because of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, when Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Iran has no embassy in Washington, relying instead on Pakistan as a “protecting power” to provide limited diplomatic representation in the U.S.
Western officials throughout the Middle East have been bracing for Iranian retaliation, while Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has led an official mourning of the general’s death. Although Trump’s decision to conduct the airstrike has raised fears of war with Iran, some regional analysts suspect that the regime’s reaction will be limited.
“I think there’s a lot of confusion in Tehran today about how to deal with a president who’s unpredictable and can actually engage in activities that his predecessor had eschewed,” Ray Takeyh, a senior Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told reporters on Monday. “And that represents a sort of a challenge that I’m not quite sure they have wrapped their head around.”
Takht-Ravanchi maintained that the regime must retaliate to satisfy the Iranian public, which he described as “demanding revenge” for the attack. “We cannot just remain indifferent to the calls by our public,” he said.
Trump’s administration scoffs at such claims about Iranian public opinion. “There will not be tears shed in Iran for the death of Soleimani by so many Iranians — he recently killed 1,500 of them,” a senior State Department official told reporters last week, referring to a recent crackdown on protesters.
Iranian officials might have been spurred by those protests to try to pick a fight with the U.S. in recent weeks, as Iranian-controlled militias killed an American civilian and wounded U.S. troops in a rocket barrage last month before storming the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad last week.
“You can imagine in your mind that the Iranians were looking for some kind of response that then they could use to push the United States out of Iraq, for example, or even immobilize its own population,” said Amy Jaffe, another Council on Foreign Relations expert who analyzes energy and environmental policy, on Monday. “The wrinkle of the choice that was made here really throws a real wild card into the transaction because the measure of it was so different than probably what was expected.”
The Iranian diplomat made his comments on the same day that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to grant a visa to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who planned to travel to the U.N. for meetings later this week. That decision followed repeated complaints from Pompeo about how Zarif enjoys high-profile media access during his visits to the U.S.
“Zarif gets to come here, he comes to New York, he drives around in the most wonderful city in America, and he speaks to the media, he talks to the American public, gets to put Iranian propaganda out into the American airwaves,” Pompeo said in July. “I’d like a chance to go not do propaganda, but speak the truth to the Iranian people about what it is their leadership has done and how it has harmed Iran.”
State Department officials did not reply to a request for comment on Takht-Ravanchi’s remarks. “I think some of the sort of — I guess, the word is hysteria — that’s permeating the United States is overstated,” Takeyh concluded. “I do think what the president did … it did restore American deterrent power.”
