Accusations flew between officials from the United States and Iran on Sunday as US officials reiterated their claim that Tehran is destabilising Iraq by funding the insurgency there and providing weapons for extremists.
The exchange took place during discussion at a meeting of the Jordan-based World Economic Forum (WEF) being held on the shores of the Dead Sea resort and come ahead of a planned US-Iran meeting in Baghdad on May 28.
"We have evidence that Iran is participating in destabilising Iraq," US Senator Orrin G Hatch said. However, his claims were vehemently denied by the leadership of Iran during a discussion at the forum gathering.
Hatch asked Iran for "some indication of respect, some indication of willingness" to abide by the rule to law. Mohammed Larijani, Iranian deputy minister of foreign affairs, said it is in Iran's national interest to have a unified, peaceful Iraq.
But he also noted that Iran had not been getting any signs of respect from the US ahead of the Baghdad meeting. "(Senator Hatch) talks about respect. We have been labelled as part of the axis of evil. And we are threatened every other day that (our) government should be changed," he said.
"They say our meeting should be only at ambassadorial level. Are these good signs of respect? Definitely not," Larijani said.
Concerning the raging violence in Iraq, Larijani said Bush should not have expected a "red carpet" to be rolled out when the US invaded Iraq in 2003. "Nobody likes occupation."
Larijani said the upcoming meeting - even with Iran's cooperation - "will not solve all the problems in the world" but "it will open a path."
A day earlier, Iran's foreign minister also levelled blame at the US, saying that it did many wrong things in Iraq, and that in the next meeting Iran would show the US where it went wrong and how to correct the wrongs. They also expected an "offer of withdrawal" of US troops from Iraq. Senator Hatch said on Sunday that the US government realised that errors were made during the war on Iraq.
"There's no question that we made mistakes in the war, but the intention was good." He added that the US needs to do more and so does Iran which should "start running their own affairs" instead of running Iraq's.
"We don't enjoy having our men and women killed. We don't enjoy terror," said the senator, who was joined by US Senator Gordon H Smith in confirming that US troops would not leave Iraq until Iraqi forces are capable of handling the security situation. "We will not leave a vacuum that they can fill," said Smith, adding that there is "no question from the evidence" that Iranians and Syrians are meddling in Iraqi affairs and settling disputes on the territory of Iraq.
Iraqi officials at the session which brought Iranian, Iraqi and US figures together joined the rhetoric, saying that foreign powers not only engage in sectarian conflicts, but also encourage the Iraqis to take sides - sometimes through direct financing.
On the sidelines, Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi said that if US troops withdrew, they would "leave a security vacuum and so (the country) could slide into chaos."
Multinational forces in Iraq have lately been reporting more and more findings of Iranian-marked bombs and weapons - some of which earlier official reports traced back to Quds, a group affiliated with right-wing members of the Iranian government.
Iran, however, continues to deny this. Larijani told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that for a country that "has more than 150,000 troops allowed, bombarding houses and people everyday, it's shameful to accuse us of infiltrating arms to Iraq."
The Iranian-marked weapons, he said, could be passing through the border from any of Iraq's neighbours: "We're selling arms to other countries, officially. They could be smuggled into Iraq illegally, so could American weapons and German weapons."
During the session, Larijani told US and Iraqi officials that militants in Iraq "don't need arms from Iran. Iraq is full of arms, the borders are open. They could come from anywhere."
Meanwhile, al-Hashimi told dpa that the Iraqi government "hasn't seen the Iranian weapons, but I do believe that there is a concrete report on that."
-DPA