IRGC Weighs in on US Vote, Says ‘US Hostility Toward Iran’ Unchanging Whether GOP, Dems in Office

Americans are heading to the polls Tuesday for the 2020 presidential and congressional election, with the US Elections Project estimating that over 99 million people have already voted early in what is shaping up to be the most divisive election in modern US history.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the elite branch of the Iranian Armed Forces tasked with defending the country’s Islamic republican political system, has weighed in on the US election, indicating that neither of America’s two major political parties can guarantee normalised relations with Tehran.

“After more than 60 years of confrontation and animosity [shown] by the domineering US regime toward the Iranian people with Democratic or Republican presidents at the helm of power, what stands out is an irrefutable fact, especially over the past four decades, is that US arrogance and hostility toward the Islamic Republic have not changed,” the IRGC noted in a statement quoted by PressTV.

The statement, referring to the 1953 CIA-backed coup d’état against the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, and Washington’s animosity toward the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which overthrew the US puppet government of Shah Reza Pahlavi, was published on the eve of the anniversary of the 4 November 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran.

Flashback From Iran’s 1979 Takeover of US Embassy

© Photo : Public domain

Commemorating the latter event, the IRGC urged Iranians to step up resistance to the US economic war against their nation.

“The fight against arrogance, which is rooted in the belief system of the Muslim nation of Iran and is one of the principles of the Islamic Revolution, will never be undermined by Western psychological warfare and media propaganda or the transfer of power between Republican and Democratic parties in the United States,” the IRGC stressed.

Iran Takes ‘Wait and See’ Approach to US Vote

On election eve Monday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif expressed caution regarding which candidate – Donald Trump or Joe Biden, Tehran would prefer to win. “The statements by the Biden camp have been more promising, but we will have to wait and see,” Zarif said, speaking to CBS News, quickly adding that “the behaviour of the US,” not promises or slogans, are what count.

“If the US decides to stop its malign behaviour against Iran, then it will be a different story no matter who sits in the White House,” Zarif stressed.

The Iranian foreign minister also took the Democratic candidate to task for his pledge to ‘renegotiate’ the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, saying that if the Iranian side had wanted to renegotiate the deal, it would have done so with President Trump. “We can find a way to reengage, obviously. But re-engagement does not mean renegotiation. It means the US coming back to the negotiating table,” Zarif explained.

The Trump administration unilaterally pulled out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 and slapped the Islamic Republic with crushing economic, energy and banking sector sections. Over the next two years, the two nations edged to the brink of war repeatedly following a series of oil tanker sabotage incidents and ship seizures in the Persian Gulf culminated in the June 2019 shootdown of a $220 million US drone over Iranian airspace, and the unprovoked January 2020 assassination of a senior Iranian general in Baghdad, which was followed by Iranian missile strikes on two US bases in Iraq which left over 100 US troops with traumatic brain injuries. This spring, the US Navy warned that it would blow hostile vessels out of the water if they approached and “harassed” US warships in the Persian Gulf.

The 2015 nuclear deal, signed by the United States, Iran, Russia, China, France, the UK, Germany and the European Union, was the first major thawing of tensions between Washington and Tehran since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Successive administrations, both Democrat and Republican, have traditionally expressed a bipartisan consensus on the need to put pressure on Iran and ‘contain’ its regional geopolitical and economic ambitions.