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NEW YORK, May 27: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned on Tuesday that any effort to remake Iraq in Iran’s image “will be aggressively put down”.
The warning followed a White House statement calling the arrests of suspected Al Qaeda members in Iran an insufficient response to US demands for a crackdown. Mr Rumsfeld said interference in Iraq by its neighbours or its proxies will not be permitted.
“Indeed, Iran should be on notice: Efforts to try to remake Iraq in Iran’s image will be aggressively put down,” he said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.
The remark came amid US charges that Tehran is seeking to influence events in Iraq, that it is harbouring senior Al Qaeda leaders and that it is developing nuclear weapons.
The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the US administration was considering “public and private” actions to destabilize the Iranian government.
Mr Rumsfeld said there had been discussion on whether to deal with Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, a moderate, or deal with the religious leaders, or not deal with either.
He said the argument for dealing with President Khatami was that it would encourage moderate forces.
“The argument against that is that he clearly is there at the whim of the clerics, and each time he moves toward very much reform, he gets his leash, the chain, pulled on him and he is stopped from doing that,” Rumsfeld said.
For that reason, he said, US policy in recent years has been “not to engage the top two layers of that country” in the hope that the people of Iran would “find ways to persuade the leadership in that country that they are going down the wrong road”.
“My personal view is that I am still amazed at how fast it went from the Shah of Iran to the clerics, to the Ayatollah Khomeini,” Mr Rumsfeld said.
“Maybe we will be favourably surprised someday that it will go back to something where the people of that country will have a broader voice and an opportunity to affect their lives, which clearly they are restricted from doing today.”
WHITE HOUSE: In the White House statement, spokesman Ari Fleischer said: “We continue to have concerns about Al Qaeda being in Iran.”
Mr Fleischer said a meeting of senior administration officials to consider new ways to pressure Iran, which had previously been reported to be scheduled to take place on Tuesday, would not happen. “There is no meeting today,” he said.
A US official said Mr Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were expected to hold a meeting on Iran policy on Thursday.
One source familiar with the policy debate said there would be a higher-level “principles” meeting at which top administration officials would consider ways to step up pressure on Iran. Another source confirmed there was a meeting on Thursday, but was not sure at what level.
“What we will be doing is looking at what our options are to try to get the Iranians to cooperate on Al Qaeda in ways that they have in the past. If there’s an indication that we can’t expect that kind of cooperation again, then we’ll be looking at other options,” a US official said. —Reuters
