Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the US withdrawal would constitute “golden pages” in Iraq’s history, reported Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency.
“Despite the US military and political presence in Iraq, and Washington’s pressures on the country, all Iraq people...said, ‘No, to US,’” Khamenei declared in a Tehran meeting with Massoud Barzani, president of Iraq’s Kurdish region.
President Barack Obama has announced that all 39,000 remaining combat troops in Iraq will be withdrawn by December 31. Washington sought to leave some troops behind, but Baghdad refused to bow to US demands for legal immunity for remaining US combat forces.
The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq ordered by then-President George W. Bush ousted Saddam Hussein, a secular Sunni Muslim and archenemy of the theocratic state in Shiite Iran. Saddam’s fall paved the way for the rise in Baghdad of a Shiite-led power bloc with close ties to Iran.
The US pullout from Iraq after almost nine years has now become a political issue in the United States.
Some Republicans and others have said the move opens the door for further Iranian meddling in neighboring Iraq.
The Obama administration denies that the withdrawal represents a geopolitical defeat and has issued several thinly veiled warnings to Iran against interfering in Iraqi affairs. “The message to Iran and everybody else that might have any ideas there is that the US is going to have a presence in the region for a long time to come,” Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said last week.
But Panetta’s admonitions and other declarations from Washington have been greeted with ridicule in Tehran. The Iranian defense minister, Ahmad Vahidi, said on Sunday Panetta’s comments were an effort to conceal “US desperation and its failure.”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s announcement last week that Washington would create a “virtual embassy” to reach out to Iranians was denounced by Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, as “mistaking diplomacy with a toy.”
The escalating US-Iranian war of words about Iraq appears to be part of heightened tensions between the two adversaries, which have been at ideological loggerheads since the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew the shah of Iran, a longtime US ally.
This month US authorities linked Iran to an alleged assassination-for-hire scheme to kill Saudi Arabia’s US ambassador, with the help of Mexican drug hit men. Tehran has denied any involvement in the alleged conspiracy and derided the charges as implausible. Washington is seeking European support for a new round of sanctions against Iran in response to the alleged plot.
The Obama administration has called for Iran’s close ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, to step down after months of anti-government demonstrations and a government crackdown. Iran has stood by Assad and denounced what it calls foreign plotting against Damascus.
Tehran and Washington have also clashed about Iran’s nuclear aims. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and has denied Western charges that it is trying to develop a nuclear weapon.
(MCT–Los Angeles Times)
