President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday US allegations
of an Iranian assassination plot resembled its claims of weapons of mass
destruction that formed the basis for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and would
prove to be equally untrue.
Ahmadinejad said Washington had fabricated the plot of an
Iranian seeking to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington in order to
cause a rift between Tehran and Saudi Arabia and dominate the oil-rich Gulf.
“In the past the US administration claimed there were
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They said it so strongly, they offered and
presented documentations and everyone said ‘yes, we believe in you, we buy
it’,” Ahmadinejad said in a live interview on Al Jazeera television.
“Now is everyone asking them, were those claims true?
Did they find any weapon of mass destruction in Iraq? They fabricated a bunch
of papers. Is that a difficult thing to do?
“The truth will be revealed ultimately and there will
be no problem for us at that time,” Ahmadinejad said.
US President Barack Obama hopes the foiled alleged plot will
lead to tighter sanctions against Iran – already under several rounds of U.N.
measures over its nuclear programme – and repeated that all options are on the
table to deal with the Islamic republic – a tacit threat of possible military
action.
When asked whether he thought Iran and the United States
were on an inevitable “collision course” towards military conflict,
Ahmadinejad replied: “I don’t think so.
“I think that there are some people in the US
administration who want this to happen but I think there are wise people in the
US administration who know they shouldn’t do such a thing.”
Nevertheless, the commander of the Iranian army ground
forces said his troops were “fully prepared and ready to give a quick
response to any aggression on Iran’s soil”.
“Today America is too unsteady to even think about
launching an attack on Iran,” Ahmad Reza Pourdastan told the semi-official
Fars news agency.
Saudi Arabia, Iran’s main rival in the Gulf and with close
ties with Washington, requested the United Nations look into what it called the
“heinous conspiracy” and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday
he had passed correspondence about the affair to the Security Council.
Ahmadinejad called on Saudis not to fall for a US strategy
which he said aimed to divide and conquer the Gulf.
“If the US administration is under the impression that
by doing this it can create conflict between us and Saudi Arabia then I have to
say the US administration is sorely mistaken.
“The US administration is not interested in Iran or in
Saudi Arabia. They see their interests in having a dispute between Iran and
Saudi Arabia — they want to dominate our region,” he said.
Iran’s relations with Saudi Arabia have been strained by the
events of the “Arab Spring” as each tries to assert its position in
the region amid a welter of sectarian and geo-political rivalries.
Even before the Arab uprisings began, a leaked US cable
published on WikiLeaks said Saudi King Abdullah had urged the United States to
“cut off the head of the snake” by launching military strikes to destroy
Iran’s nuclear programme.
The plot furore appears to have killed any chance of a rapid
return to talks between Tehran and world powers concerned about its nuclear
programme, but Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Iran would examine the
allegations.
“We are prepared to examine any issue, even if
fabricated, seriously and patiently, and we have called on America to submit to
us any information in regard to this scenario,” he was quoted as saying by
the official IRNA news agency.
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