Yesterday a senior member of the Iranian Parliament said the recent UN sanctions are “an open declaration of war against Iran by the six major powers.”

This is a mid-level but heavy-weight warning to the United States. It is quite serious, taken in conjunction with the War Alert and concomitant full military mobilization in northern Iran beginning the last week of June.

The statement was made by Mohammad Karami-Rad, who is a member of Iran’s Foreign Policy and National Security Commission. He is several steps down from the top policy makers in Iran. But his remarks were spotlighted by both Fars, the official news agency of Iran, and PressTV, which is the English language outlet for Iranian official news to the West.

Clearly, official Iran wants to get the message across to the United States and Israel that they consider the current sanctions to be an ‘act of war’ against Iran. But hey are not yet ready to declare it from the highest levels, lest they either provoke the Western powers into direct military action, or paint themselves into a political corner where the only solution is declaring war on the West.

Curiously, Karami-Rad’s statement first focuses on the UN sanctions, not the more recent US sanctions. That is odd because the UN sanctions are quite mild. The week-old US sanctions, if fully implemented, are aimed at the jugular of Iran’s economy.

We have to wait a little for him to get to his core message. Later in his statement to Fars, almost as an afterthought, he reveals that the US sanctions are the real worry for Iran. “If the US and Western countries go beyond sanctions and endanger the interests of the Islamic Republic, they should rest assured that they will pay a heavy price.”

He makes a point of saying the US sanctions are not authorized by the UN, which is true. He comes just short of saying they are illegal, which is probably not true. He hints that those sanctions are biting deeply into the Iranian economy, which is very, very true despite mainstream US media ignoring the US sanctions, or trivializing them as ineffective or simply exacerbating black market trade. Important: see the two previous posts, US Sanctions Biting Iran Hard, and more especially the very revealing Libyan Ship to Gaza Blockade -The Real Story, which has a 1-2-3 list of Iran’s possible options for dealing with the sanctions.

Karami-Rad promises heavy retaliation if the US sanctions continue to be implemented.

That is in line with every statement coming from every level in Iran’s political hierarchy, both secular and religious.