Iran has right to defend self: Commentator

Commenting on Iran’s newly-unveiled air defense system, a former US Army psychological warfare officer says Iran has the right to defend itself against any aggression, saying US President Donald Trump shouldn’t rely on “liars” and warmongers seeking to initiate a war on the country.

In an interview with Press TV on Thursday, Scott Bennett said, “Iran has the right to defend its people and culture and infrastructure.”

“Iran is feeling she has been put in a defensive position because a war is about to be initiated against it most likely next spring or summer, before the 2020 [US presidential] election, by Israel,” Bennett said.

He said US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were “scrambling” to form a US-Israeli joint military alliance similar to the one that started World War I in preparation for an Israeli strike on Iran.

So Iran has developed a “fabulous” defense system to defend itself from any military aggression whether it is from the US military base in Qatar, the US central command, or Israel, he said.

Iran unveiled the domestically-built missile defense system Bavar-373 on Thursday.

Referring to Trump’s promise to get the US out of any international war, Bennett blamed the US president’s hawkish National Security Adviser John Bolton and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whom he called “liars,” for feeding their president with propaganda and false information about Iran, stressing that Iran was not a hostile force and not an enemy of the American people.

Trump “has to really get smart and to stop relying on liars,” Bennett said.

PressTV-Iran's Bavar-373 system outpowers US Patriot: General

Iran says its homegrown missile defense system Bavar-373 is even stronger than its American counterpart Patriot system.

Speaking in the same interview, Johanna Leblanc, a foreign affairs and national security analyst from Washington DC, also acknowledged that, “Iran, as a sovereign state, has the right to do what it needs to do to protect itself against both external and internal threats.”

“Iran is not a threat because Iran has a ‘you strike first’ policy. So, unless a country strikes Iran first, Iran will not react,” she said.

But, she said she believed the Trump administration did not intend to invade Iran, saying the administration had made it very clear that it wanted to pull the US forces out of the region.

Leblanc cited a study by Harvard University that she said showed that over 50 percent of the US population didn’t want the US to go to war with Iran unless it attacks the United States first. She added that only five percent of the Americans wanted such a war, according to the same poll.

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