Alwaght- Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has condemned the United States' “sheer hypocrisy” for opposing Iran's defensive missile program while flooding the West Asia region with all kinds of weapons.
In a message posted on his official Twitter account on Monday, Zarif said the pressure put on Iran by the West to dismantle its missile defense program comes while the US and major European countries encourage their allies in West Asia (Middle East) to purchase more weapons.
"Customer Service’ pledge by US/E3 arms producers: Buy our weapons & our governments will provide after-sales support by pressuring your neighbor to dismantle its defenses,” he said.
The Iranian top diplomat added that Washington and its European allies were whining about Iran's defensive missile program while pouring hundreds of billions of dollars of arms into the region.
Iran has insisted that its missile program is purely defensive while rejecting any negotiations on the issue amid US President Donald Trump's constant efforts to link Iran's missile program to the 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Trump has repeatedly described the JCPOA, which was negotiated under his predecessor Barack Obama, as “the worst and most one-sided transaction Washington has ever entered into,” a characterization he often used during his presidential campaign, and threatened to tear it up.
The US has repeatedly claimed that Iran’s missile program is in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorses the JCPOA.
The UNSC document terminated the provisions of seven previous UNSC resolutions against Iran, some of which had imposed restrictions on Iranian missile activities. Such activities are not prohibited under the newer document, which merely calls on Iran “to refrain from any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”
Iran says it has no such warheads and no such missiles. It has put its nuclear program under enhanced international monitoring as part of the nuclear deal. And Iranian compliance with the deal has been consistently verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Yet, the United States, a party to the agreement, has attempted to portray Iranian missile tests as a violation of the resolution.
