From the Liveblog of
Monday, July 11, 2022
Senior Iranian officer says Israeli-partnered ‘Arab NATO’ doomed to fail
A top officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps blasts the regional says an air defense pact between Israel and Arab regional allies — formed under US leadership to counter the threat of Iran’s drones and missiles — is doomed to fail.
Brigadier General Yadollah Javani cites previous regional pacts, some of which also included American involvement, as proof that such initiatives fail, speaking ahead of Biden’s visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
“When the United States and the Zionist regime and Saudi Arabia were at the peak of their power, the coalitions that they built to counter the resistance front and the Islamic Republic had no other result but failure,” Javani says, according to Press TV.
“An example is the coalition that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia formed along with many other countries against the oppressed nation of Yemen. However, they got nothing, but humiliating defeat,” he adds.
Javani also claims that efforts by the US, Saudi Arabia and “about 100 European and regional countries” to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power failed, “despite spending trillions of dollars over these years… and today, the resistance front is more powerful than ever before.
“Therefore, it is quite easy to predict the possible fate of the [so-called] Arab NATO. Compared to the past coalitions, the new alliance will be even weaker and lack effectiveness in the face of the resistance front and the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he says.
The pact, called “MEAD — Middle East Air Defense,” is meant to connect air defense systems to combat Iran’s increasing use of drones and missiles in the Middle East.
