The US: US Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld warned yesterday that any effort to rebuild Iraq in the image of neighbouring Iran - which has an Islamic form of government - "will be aggressively put down". Conor O'Clery, in New York, reports
Speaking in New York, Mr Rumsfeld said interference in Iraq by its neighbours or its proxies will not be permitted.
"Indeed, Iran should be on notice: Efforts to try to rebuild Iraq in Iran's image will be aggressively put down," he said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.
The warning comes after the US stepped up pressure on Iran for allegedly harbouring al-Qaeda leaders and developing nuclear weapons. Iranian diplomats have strongly denied the al-Qaeda charge and said several followers of Osama bin Laden are being detained in Iran.
Members of the US administration are reported to be considering "public and private" actions to destabilise Iran's Islamic regime, said the Washington Post.
Senior US officials, including Mr Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Ms Condoleezza Rice will hold a policy meeting on Iran tomorrow.
Democratic senator Mr Joseph Biden yesterday attacked the Bush administration campaign against Iran, saying the two wars against Iraq had been fought on faulty intelligence and that charges were now being laid against Iran without proof.
White House spokesman Mr Ari Fleischer also stepped up the pressure on Tehran yesterday, saying the Iranian government had responded "insufficiently" to Washington's complaints.
Washington, which has not had diplomatic ties with Tehran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, has also accused Iran of interfering in Iraq since the US-led occupation. The leader of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq recently returned to Iraq after exile in Tehran.
Mr Rumsfeld said that Washington had not decided whether to deal with the moderate Iranian President Mohammad Khatami or with the clerics, or neither.
While dealing with Mr Khatami would encourage moderate forces, "the argument against that is that he clearly is there at the whim of the clerics, and each time he moves toward very much reform, he gets his leash, the chain, pulled on him and he is stopped from doing that." He said the US had no "template" for the future government of Iraq but the effort to find a new government would "take time, trial and error, and experimentation".