Iran warned Washington on Tuesday to stay out of its internal affairs, amid US newspaper reports that the White House was contemplating stirring up a popular revolt against the Islamic republic.
”We hope logic and reason will prevail in the Americans’ debates and that they will avoid taking an interventionist stance,” foreign ministry spokesperson Hamid Reza Assefi said.
His words coincided with the reported launch of talks in the White House on whether to foment a rebellion against Iran’s clerics, who Washington accuses of links to the May 12 Riyadh suicide bombings that killed 34 people.
Reacting to media accounts of the new White House policy, Assefi said: ”We do not know to what degree this information is true. But we have always told the Americans to avoid meddling in our internal affairs.”
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that top members of US President George Bush’s administration would meet on Tuesday to discuss strategy toward the Islamic republic in the wake of the Riyadh blasts.
The White House believes the attacks were planned by members of the al-Qaeda terror network hiding in Iran. Pentagon officials were advocating a popular uprising to topple Iran’s government, and the State Department could accept the approach if Iran did not take steps to crack down on al-Qaeda by Tuesday, the Post said.
Iran and the United States broke off relations after Tehran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, and Bush last year famously labelled the country as part of an ”axis of evil” along with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea.
US officials have also been worried about Iran’s nuclear programme
But the two sides made ”discreet contacts” before and during the war on Iraq, most recently through a secret meeting in Geneva on May 3.
Washington cancelled a subsequent meeting after the bombings in Saudi Arabia, the Post said, after reviewing intelligence intercepts that reportedly show al-Qaeda operatives, hiding in Iran, were involved in planning the attacks.
Iran has insisted it has no links to al-Qaeda and said it arrested and quickly extradited hundreds of its members fleeing the 1991 US attack on Afghanistan, which the group had formerly used as its operations hub. – Sapa-AFP