Iran will kill "dozens" of US military commanders for each Iranian commander murdered, if covert hits urged by two US defence analysts last month are carried out, a senior Iranian military chief warned on Tuesday.
"If you kill one of us, we will kill dozens of yours," the Fars news agency quoted Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the elite Revolutionary Guards' aerospace division, as saying.
In remarks directed to the US military, he stressed that "you must not forget that American commanders are present and travel around in Afghanistan, Iraq and regional countries."
His comments referred to October 26 testimony by two hawkish US military experts to a congressional committee, looking at possible ways to hit back at Iran for an alleged plot by Iranian officials to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington.
In that session, a retired four-star general who helped plan the US-led occupation of Iraq, Jack Keane, and a former CIA agent, Reuel Marc Gerecht, argued for the targeted, covert murders of Revolutionary Guards officers.
"Why don't we kill them? We kill other people who are running terrorist organisations against the United States," Keane told the panel.
The US congressmen listening to them did not endorse that proposal. But several said they were not excluding any measures against Iran.
Iran made a formal protest over the experts' comments via the Swiss embassy in Tehran, which handles US interests in the absence of Iran-US diplomatic ties.
At the same time hawkish Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the only thing which would cause Iran's Islamic regime to sit up and listen was a series of "crippling sanctions."
"If, after the IAEA report comes out, the United States does not lead an initiative of crippling sanctions against Iran, this will mean that the United States and the West have accepted a nuclear Iran," Maariv newspaper quoted him as saying on Monday, in reference to an International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran's nuclear capability due to be released soon.
Crippling sanctions meant targeting Iran’s central bank and its oil and gas industries, he said.
Only such a course of action would yield real results and show Tehran's Islamic rulers that continuing the nuclear race would endanger Iran’s future as well as their chances of continuing to govern, Lieberman said.
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