Iranian General Locks Horns With Trump, Escalating Threat-Filled Feud

A powerful commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps escalated the invective duel with President Donald Trump on Thursday, calling his threat against Iran’s president “cabaret-style rhetoric” in remarks that political analysts called worrisome.

The commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who wields enormous influence in Iran, may emerge as its future leader and is considered a terrorist mastermind by the United States. He said Trump should pick a fight directly with him and not Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani.

In a Twitter message Sunday posted in all-capital letters, Trump warned Rouhani that he would suffer “consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before” if he threatened the United States.

Top aides to Rouhani dismissed Trump’s warning, apparently viewing it as an attempt by the U.S. president to replicate his strategy of threats against another adversary, North Korea.

But Soleimani’s public challenge to Trump appeared to signal that the Iranian hierarchy felt obliged to send a more assertive reply.

“It is beneath the dignity of our president to respond to you,” Soleimani said in a speech in western Iran reported by state-run media. “I, as a soldier, respond to you.”

Directly addressing Trump, Soleimani said: “You threaten us with an action that is ‘unprecedented’ in the world. This is cabaret-style rhetoric. Only a cabaret owner talks to the world this way.”

Deriding what he described as the history of U.S. military failures in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the region, Soleimani said Trump was in no position to issue threats to Iran.

“We are near you, where you can’t even imagine,” he said. “We are ready. We are the man of this arena.”

While the possibility of a war between Iran and the United States is considered extremely low, political analysts worry that escalating threats could lead to something more serious.

Soleimani’s words and actions are closely scrutinized because he is regarded as one of Iran’s most cunning and autonomous military figures, in charge of its intelligence gathering and covert military operations.

“His fire-breathing retort to Trump is important and worrisome,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy in Washington.

“Soleimani is directly mocking the U.S. president, and he lambastes U.S. policy,” Kupchan said. “Soleimani is telling Trump to watch his words, reminding him that Iran has both power across the Middle East and potent capability for asymmetric warfare. That’s an implicit threat against U.S. assets in the Middle East.”

A once-shadowy figure who now enjoys celebritylike status among the hard-line conservatives in Iran, Soleimani leads the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, a special forces unit responsible for Iranian operations outside Iran’s borders. Quds is the Persian word for Jerusalem.

The general is known to have the personal backing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and is believed to be the chief strategist behind Iran’s military ventures and influence in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the region and beyond.

The United States has regarded Soleimani as a vexing foe for many years. It accused him of plotting attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The Treasury Department placed him on a sanctions blacklist in 2011, accusing the commander of complicity in what U.S. officials called a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

But the United States also has found itself in the awkward position of cooperating with Soleimani in Iraq, where the Americans and Iranians have both worked to reverse gains made by the Islamic State.

He was in the northern Iraqi city of Tikrit in 2015, commanding Iraqi Shiite militias attempting to recapture it from Islamic State fighters before U.S. warplanes belatedly joined that campaign.