TEHRAN, March 9 (Xinhua) -- Iranian officials
on Friday urged U.S.-led coalition forces to withdraw from Iraq, just one day
before an international conference on Iraq's security in Baghdad.
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 United States 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 U.S. 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 U.S.-favored administration in Iraq.
He said that the United States "plans to set up an
administration in Iraq which is favored and monopolized by the Americans and by
this the U.S. 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 U.S. policies in the war-torn
country.
"The Baghdad meeting will be a test for assessing the
U.S. 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 U.S. officials are scheduled to
participate in the Baghdad conference, there is a split within the U.S.
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, U.S.
ambassador to Iraq, have concluded that recent U.S. moves to pressure Iran now
allow the United States to negotiate with Tehran from a position of strength, an
unidentified senior U.S. 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 United States 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 United States should
not be seen as making concession to Iran, and talking is a concession, the
unidentified official said.
The United States 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.
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