A senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps official said Saturday that the United States had pursued the overthrow of the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution and that nuclear issues were among several pretexts for pressure, the IRGC-affiliated Fars news agency reported.
“Those who say that if we had stopped enrichment, there would have been no war either lack accurate historical knowledge or are incapable of proper analysis,” Yadollah Javani, the IRGC’s deputy political chief, said in a televised interview.
Javani said Washington’s hostility toward the Islamic Republic predated Iran’s nuclear program and that nuclear, human rights, missile and regional issues were “pretexts for pressure” rather than the underlying dispute, according to the report.
He said the main issue for the United States was “an independent Iran, national sovereignty, a strong Iran and Iran’s movement toward progress.”
Javani also said the United States had entered the war because of a “miscalculation,” arguing that President Donald Trump had underestimated Iran’s military and national resilience.
“If Trump had predicted from the beginning what would happen over these six months, he definitely would not have started the war,” he said.