TEHRAN, Sept 14: Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Saturday a possible attack on Iraq was only the first step in a US plan to bring the entire Middle East under its control.

“The first target of this militaristic and propagandising belligerency is Iraq followed by the whole rest of the region,” Khamenei said in a written message to an Iranian students’ forum in London.

“The United States aims to make any independent state bow and surrender to it and to capture all vital resources in this part of the world,” he said.

While there is little love lost between Iran and Iraq, who fought a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s that killed around a million people on both sides, Tehran has added its voice to warnings that a US strike to oust President Saddam Hussein could destabilise the Middle East.

In the wake of the Sept 11 hijack attacks on US targets President George W. Bush branded Iran as part of an “axis of evil” with Iraq and North Korea.

Washington accuses Iran of arming Islamic groups fighting Israel, seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction and sheltering al Qaeda and Taliban fighters fleeing Afghanistan.

Iran strongly denies these charges and has condemned the Sept 11 attacks. But many in the Islamic republic fear it could be the next target in the US “war on terror”.

Khamenei, who controls the main levers of power in the country of 65 million people, said countries could repel an attack by a superpower such as the United States through sheer popular will.

“Thanks be to God, the great Iranian nation has such a blessing,” he said.

His comments followed a speech by the head of Iran’s powerful Expediency Council, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, on Friday in which the former president accused Bush of failing to provide the evidence to justify an attack on Iraq.

In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday Bush demanded that the United Nations impose a deadline for Iraq to obey its resolutions and let in weapons inspectors or face the consequences.

But Rafsanjani said Bush’s UN speech marked a “retreat” from his previous tone on Iraq.

“The positive aspect of Mr Bush’s speech, which gives us hope that exerting pressure would bear fruit, was that he agreed not to attack Iraq yet.

“That is, he decided to give the UN the chance to take action... The retreat of America’s president was interesting to us,” he said at Friday prayers.—Reuters