Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi cautioned the United States against fresh Israeli attempts to drag them into yet another war with Iran by lying about his country’s defense capabilities, as it did earlier this year in June.

In June, with lies about Iran’s nuclear program, Israel “managed to deceive the US into attacking the Iranian people. With the failure of that action Israel is now trying to make an imaginary threat out of our defense capabilities” Araghchi claimed in a post on X on Tuesday, October 7.

Read More: How the US & Israel used Rafael Grossi to hijack the IAEA and start a war on Iran

Araghchi hoped that “by now, Americans have had enough of fighting Israel’s Forever Wars” and will learn the lesson from their similar past experiences in Iraq where “there was only unfathomable destruction, thousands of dead American soldiers and 7 trillion American taxpayer dollars down the drain.”

Araghchi was responding to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s interview with right-wing US journalist Ben Sapiro on Monday, in which he had claimed that Iran is developing ballistic missiles with a range of 8,000 kilometers.

With slight modifications these missiles can reach American cities and bring the US “under the [Iranian] nuclear gun,” Netanyahu claimed.

Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has repeatedly stated its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only as it has no plans to develop nuclear bombs.

Araghchi also claimed that Iran and the US were on the verge of signing a new nuclear deal in June had the US president not chosen to believe Israeli deceptions about his country being on the verge of making a nuclear bomb “within a month”.

Israel launched military strikes on Iran’s civilian and nuclear facilities on June 13, killing hundreds of people, including top military leaders, scientists and common civilians. The US joined the Israeli aggression on June 22, bombing three Iranian nuclear sites.

A ceasefire was announced after Iran launched retaliatory missiles on the US base in Qatar.

No talks with Europe now

June’s Israeli attacks were launched on the eve of the fifth round of indirect talks between Iran and the US over Iran’s nuclear program.

“If POTUS was to glance at the minutes of those talks-recorded by our interlocutors-he would see how close we were to celebrating a new and historic Iran nuclear deal,” Araghchi claimed.

The indirect talks have been suspended since the attacks, with Iran demanding guarantees of nonaggression during any such talks in the future.

Meanwhile, Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesperson for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, during his regular press conference on Monday, asserted that his country has no plans to open negotiations with European countries who behaved “irresponsibly and destructively” and “abused the snapback mechanism” to relaunch international sanctions against Iran.

Claiming that the snapback mechanism adopted by the UN Security Council last month was “unnecessary and unlawful”, Baghaei repeated his country’s appeal that no country should feel obliged to implement its provisions.

“Our request to friendly nations is to refrain from contributing to the effects of [this] illegal decision,” Baghaei said.

Baghaei claimed that the three European signatories of the nuclear deal (JCPOA) invoked the snapback mechanism only to satisfy US demands and were working under US pressure.

Read More: Sanctions will harm Iranian people and hamper diplomatic channels, experts say

Iran has presented a detailed legal argument to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres about the illegality of the invocation of the snapback, Baghaei informed, apart from reiterating that at least two permanent members of the Security Council, Russia and China, have also objected to it.

The post Israel is trying to drag the US into yet another war, Iran says appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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