Occasionally it is difficult to gauge how connected to reality the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Major general Hossein Salami is. Even the Tehran Times noted that Salami is known for “fiery and aggressive speeches targeting the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.” In January 2019, Salami said: “We will fight them on the global level, not just in one spot. Our war is not a local war. We have plans to defeat the world powers.” So, kind of grandiose.
That explains the IRGC commander bewildering interview with Iran’s state TV, when he said, among other things: “The Zionist system is breaking apart, faltering, and crumbling from within. Over the past year and a half, they tried to project a powerful image of themselves, namely inflate themselves like a balloon.”
“Today, you can see the real face of the Zionist regime in its actual proportions,” the commander said, claiming there have been back-to-back monumental security disasters that the Zionist regime has been suffering over the past one to two months. Among them, he counts Iranian attacks on civilian cargo ships owned by Israelis, which, Salami said, showed how Israeli trade “can easily suffer serious obstruction.”
General Salami recalled the “powerful blast that rocked an Israeli missile factory in the central part of the occupied territories in April and gave rise to a mushroom cloud really resembling that of a nuclear explosion.” He was referring to a huge explosion that took place on April 20 during the testing of a Tomer missile engine. Tomer manufactured the engine that carried the Ofek 16 electro-optical reconnaissance satellite. The company issued a statement saying the April 20 experiment had been performed “according to the work plan, without any casualties or unusual events,” but Salami would have none of it, asking how it had chosen “a factory of all places to carry out the so-called test.”
Because that’s where they keep their test site?
Salami pointed to a “domino effect,” starting with an explosion at a Haifa Chemicals factory, scores of Israeli companies suffering a cyber attack, another blast near Ben Gurion Airport, and what he claimed was the killing of several Mossad operatives in northern Iraq.
Salami is also convinced the Zionist regime is “facing disintegration” and could break apart from within, citing its being “forced to hold four elections without achieving political stability.”
Some would argue that being strong enough to endure four elections in two years without having to send the IRGC thugs to the street to kill thousands of rebellious civilians attests to Israel’s durability, but that point would probably be wasted on General Salami.