Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Hashemi Shahroudi said that "prompt
withdrawal of occupiers" from Iraq would be a fundamental step
toward establishment of tranquility in Iraq, the official IRNA news
agency reported.
"Occupiers have a role in spreading insecurity and terror in
Iraq to justify their illegitimate presence there," Shahroudi, who
is on a visit to Jakarta, was quoted as telling Indonesian House of
Representatives Speaker Agung Laksono.
The Iranian official made the remarks before representatives
from Iraq's Arab neighbors as well as Iran, Turkey, the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council and the Arab League
are heading for Baghdad for the regional security meeting on
Saturday.
Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, chief of Iran's powerful Guardian
Council, on Friday accused the US and Britain of being responsible
for growing deaths of Iraqi civilians, the Fars News Agency
reported.
"We believe that the terrorists and those covered and backed by
the US and Britain are responsible for committing crimes and
triggering differences between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in Iraq,"
Jannati was quoted as saying at a prayer sermon in Tehran.
He said that the security meeting was aimed at establishing a
US-favored administration in Iraq.
He said that the US "plans to set up an administration in Iraq
which is favored and monopolized by the Americans and by this the
US aims to make up for its failures in Iraq."
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki confirmed on Wednesday that
Iran would participate in the conference scheduled for Saturday in
Baghdad.
"We will send the Iranian delegation which will be led by deputy
foreign minister in charge of legal and international affairs,
Abbas Araghchi," Mottaki told a press conference, stressing that
Iran's participation is to help the Iraqi government and
people.
"We are looking forward that the result of the conference would
show that countries in the region back the government and nation of
Iraq," said the minister, adding "we hope that the result will be
that an end to the presence of foreign forces in Iraq is
nearing."
Araghchi said on Thursday that the conference would be a
benchmark for testing the sincerity of US policies in the war-torn
country.
"The Baghdad meeting will be a test for assessing the US
policies and seeing whether the Americans are really after finding
solutions or continuing their adventurism," the state television
quoted Araghchi as saying.
"The previous meeting was held in Tehran and we proposed that
the next one be held in Iraq," he said.
As both Iranian and US officials are scheduled to participate in
the Baghdad conference, there is a split within the US
administration about whether to talk to Iran, the New York Times
reported Friday.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tends to have dialogue with
Iran while hard-liners, many in the office of Vice President Dick
Cheney, are opposed to the so-called "concession" to Iran.
Rice and a number of her top deputies, including David
Satterfield, Rice's top adviser on Iraq, and Zalmay Khalilzad, US
ambassador to Iraq, have concluded that recent US moves to pressure
Iran now allow the US to negotiate with Tehran from a position of
strength, an unidentified senior US official was quoted as
saying.
Those advocates of engagement argue that the recent ratcheting
up of American rhetoric against Iran, a naval buildup in the Gulf
region and arrests of Iranian officials in Iraq have now given
American officials a better hand to play at the bargaining
table.
"The US is in a position now where I think we send a very strong
message to the Iranians through the president's decision to send
the carrier strike group into the gulf, through the fact that we've
picked up some of their people who have been engaged in activities
to harm our soldiers and the fact that we've been shutting down the
international financial system to them," Rice said in an interview
on Wednesday.
"I think we're in a much stronger position to go to a neighbor's
meeting," Rice said of the Saturday conference on Iraq's
security.
On Thursday, Satterfield said that "if we are approached over
orange juice by the Syrians or the Iranians to discuss an
Iraq-related issue that is germane to this topic -- stable, secure,
peaceful, democratic Iraq -- we are not going to turn and walk
away."
But hard-liners claimed that the US should not be seen as making
concession to Iran, and talking is a concession, the unidentified
official said.
The US has accused Iran of supporting Iraqi insurgents to fight
against coalition forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime
in 2003, but Tehran has denied it and said that such an allegation
was deliberate intervention in Iran-Iraq ties.
(Xinhua News Agency March 10, 2007)
