‘Offensive capabilities’ should also be prioritized: Imam Khamenei

(AhlulBayt News Agency) - Leader of the Islamic Revolution has told a defense achievements exhibition meeting offensive capabilities should also be prioritized along with defensive capabilities.

Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei paid a visit to a defense ministry exhibition of defensive capabilities on Wednesday where he briefly addressed the Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan, staff and the researchers and scientists of the defense ministry; the exhibition was displaying the ministry’s achievements in cutting-edge latest technology of defense and products of tech incubators in defense sector and indigenous efforts of the weapons industry.

Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated his emphasis he had made during a meeting of commanders and staff of Khatam al-Anbia Air Defense base earlier on Sunday where he had demanded that defense sector should be developed in extensive scopes to help the country meet potential threats; he believed that in a world governed by ‘bullying, hypocritical, and immoral powers,’ who ‘enjoy even not a trace of human conscience,’ bolstering defensive powers would be natural right for the country, since “a formidable defense sector would discourage these powers from entertaining invasion.”

“It is a source of extreme jubilation to see defensive achievements which double the country’s margin of security; to see our expert staff and highly skilled human force also provides assurances,” the Leader told the meeting. “No restrictions would be ever considered for defensive industries except for weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear or chemical weapons which are banned on religious grounds; in offensive section, chemical weapons ban is on place; however, in defense against these weapons, we should buttress our capabilities to thwart any chemical threat.”

He believed that with a highly critical position in the Middle East where all major powers had been competing for supremacy, improving defense as well as combative capabilities would guarantee the system’s existence; “some countries had been irritated by Iran’s procurement of defensive systems; these powers systematically suffer from moral legitimacy and fairness, while they would judge others’ legibility to have defensive weapons; the US is such a power which has been morally unfit to express position on Iran’s efforts to boost her defense,” the Leader emphasized. “Both parties in the US, either the ruling Democrats or the GOP who were ruling in the past, are morally bankrupt with a dark record of systematic crimes and other plights which beset the nations elsewhere across the world; they would attack a terrorist group, but would also protect a second such group as good terrorists in flagrant preference of politics over ethics,” Ayatollah Khamenei objected.

“The past government of the US (Bush’s administration) is accountable for its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan for the consequences of catastrophic triumphalism in the imagined war on terrorism; their smallest crime have been to hunt many of Iraqi scientists, either military or civilian, by the mercenary group Blackwater,” he illustrated his case to close the address.




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