President Donald Trump on Thursday amplified warnings to Iran over the country's missile tests, writing in a tweet that Tehran was "formally put on notice for firing a ballistic missile."
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His words echoed a remark made the day before by national security adviser Michael Flynn, who said the U.S. was "putting Iran on notice" over its most recent ballistic missile test.
A top adviser to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Thursday responded, saying "the American government will understand that threatening Iran is useless," according to the Reuters news agency, citing local media.
"This is not the first time that an inexperienced person has threatened Iran," the adviser, Ali Akbar Velayati, said, according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency. "Iran does not need permission from any country to defend itself."
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The missile tests are not covered by the nuclear pact, and Iran claims that the launches do not violate other U.N. resolutions because the missiles are not designed to carry nuclear warheads.
Bahram Ghasemi, an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, called Flynn's comments "baseless, provocative and repetitive."
Trump, in his Twitter messages, said Iran "was on its last legs and ready to collapse until the U.S. came along and gave it a life-line in the form of the Iran Deal: $150 billion."
Asked by a reporter Thursday if he would rule out a U.S. military response to the missile test, Trump said, "Nothing is off the table."
Although the launch was a medium-range, ballistic missile that fell within Iran's borders, "it's something that is contrary to the Security Council resolutions against it and the agreements it's made," Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters Thursday.
"Iran has a lot of things it is doing and has done that causes us concern," Davis said. "There's this common thread of malign influence with regard to Iran through the region," including the "harassment" of U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf.
Republicans have long criticized the 2015 nuclear accord with a group of six world powers but were stymied in their efforts to undermine it by the Obama administration. The president attacked his two immediate predecessors' policies head-on. "Iran is rapidly taking over more and more of Iraq even after the U.S. has squandered three trillion dollars there. Obvious long ago!" he said on Twitter Wednesday night.
Republicans in the House announced plans for legislation targeting Iran's support for "terrorism, human rights abuses and ballistic missile program." Among other steps, the measure would impose new sanctions on Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and against people who "knowingly aid" its missile program. Similar legislation was previously introduced in the Senate.
Iran says the resolution in question only bars it from testing missiles that can deliver nuclear warheads, armaments it doesn't plan to obtain.
Trump's administration didn't offer details of what policy or military options it may be considering. An administration official, who asked not to be identified, told reporters afterward that there are a range of options available to counter Tehran's actions.
Former Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus, testifying to the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, said ending the nuclear deal would leave the U.S. isolated. He suggested Congress and the White House consider making a statement of national policy that Iran won't be allowed to enrich uranium to weapons grade instead.
After a decade of isolation under U.S.-led international sanctions, Iran last year began seeing greater interest from businesses and banks in its $370 billion economy as the nuclear deal took affect. But the agreement didn't unwind all U.S. sanctions, and Iranian officials have repeatedly complained that many foreign companies and banks remain reluctant of running afoul of those restrictions, limiting new investment.
Information for this article was contributed by Anne Gearan, Erin Cunningham, Carol Morello and Brian Murphy of The Washington Post and by Golnar Motevalli, Ladane Nasseri, Kambiz Foroohar and Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 02/03/2017