WASHINGTON, June 1: US Senator John McCain said on Saturday that the United States was not getting the cooperation it needs from Saudi Arabia and urged the Bush administration to bring democracy to Iran as well.

McCain, a senior leader of the Republican Party, is considered close to President Bush and an important member of America’s ruling elite.

“We have not gotten the cooperation from Saudi Arabia that we need. Saudi Arabia continues to fund the Madressas, these radical Islamic schools which take kids off the street and teach them to hate and kill,” said the senator who is respected across the United States as a Vietnam war veteran where he was captured in 1967 when his plane was shot down. He spent five years in prison.

“They have never given us the cooperation that we need as far as Khobar towers, and they’re still not giving us the cooperation on these latest sets of attacks. In my views, the Saudis are riding a tiger and they may pay a very high price for it,” Sen McCain told Fox News on Sunday.

The United States, he said, has to “be far more assertive with Saudi Arabia in having every right to expect a lot more cooperation that we’ve received.”

Saudi Arabia has faced intensive criticism in the United States following suicide bomb attacks in Jeddah last month that killed 34 people, including nine Americans.

Politicians from both the ruling Republican and the opposition Democratic parties have been urging the government to be stricter in its dealings with the kingdom.

Asked how should the United States prevent Iran from making nuclear weapons, the senator said that “the military option is the absolute last, as it was in Iraq.”

The United States, he said, would exercise every other option, long before we would exercise a military option. “But look, any nation in the world that harbours people who want to attack and kill innocent Americans has to be held responsible. We have to go where the terrorists are and we have every right to expect cooperation from those governments.”