Iranian Foreign Minister Tells CNN a U.S. Military Strike Means ‘All-Out War’: ‘We Won’t Blink’

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif promised in a CNN interview that if President Donald Trump launched a military strike against Iran, it would escalate into “all-out war.”

Zarif spoke with CNN correspondent Nick Paton Walsh in an exclusive interview, who asked “what would be the consequence of an American or Saudi military strike on Iran right now?”

“An all-out war,” Zarif responded.

“You make a very serious statement there, sir,” Walsh said.

“Well, I make a very serious statement about defending our country. I’m making a very serious statement that we don’t want war. We don’t want to engage in a military confrontation. We believe that a military confrontation based on deception is awful. We’ll have a lot of casualties. But we won’t blink to defend our territory,” Zarif said.

“[The Saudis] want to pin the blame on Iran in order to achieve something and that is why I’m saying this is agitation for war. Because it’s based on lies. It’s based on deception,” he continued.

Walsh then asked how the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have claimed responsibility for attacks, were able to launch a high-tech attack on Saudi oil facilities when “this is a rag-tag group of rebels who’ve been under siege for years, they struggle to get medicine and they struggle to get food.”

“If you want to make your calculations based on this, Saudi Arabia should have been able to win this war against this group of besieged people exactly when they thought they would four weeks after they started the war,” Zarif responded. “It’s been four and a half years, they have not been able to bring the Yemenis to their knees.”

Watch above, via CNN.

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