WASHINGTON, Sept 19, (Agencies): US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Sunday on “responsible” leaders to assert control in Iran and said the toughest sanctions yet were beginning to bite on the military-backed regime.
Short of an explicit call to the Iranian people to revolt, Clinton’s comments represented a sharpening of US rhetoric as it increasingly seeks to portray Iran as a military dictatorship.
Clinton said the military, the elite Revolutionary Guard and other militia were wielding more and more power to prop up a regime struggling to maintain its legitimacy since last year’s “very flawed” presidential elections.
“And I can only hope that there will be some effort inside Iran, by responsible civil and religious leaders, to take hold of the apparatus of the state,” she told ABC News.
“When you empower a military as much as they have to rely on them to put down legitimate protests and demonstrations, you create a momentum and unleash forces that you do not know where they will end up.
“And I know that that’s a concern of people inside Iran. We read reports coming out of Iran. And it is something that would be even more distressing for the Iranian people.”
Iranian opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi have repeatedly called for fresh presidential elections and rejected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s authority since he was reelected in June 2009.
Clinton said the United States had made it “very clear” to the Iranian people that it was behind their efforts to demonstrate against the “illegitimate” election.
“But we also knew that the worst thing for those protesting was for them to be seen as stooges of the United States,” she said.
“Now it’s very delicate.... But our bottom line is, we think the Iranian people deserve so much more than what they are now being given and we are worried about the direction we see Iran headed.”
The remarks about Iran’s increased militarization drew an angry response from Ahmadinejad, interviewed by ABC in New York where he is to attend next week’s UN General Assembly meeting.
“Don’t you think that Mrs. Clinton should think a little bit before she makes statements of such nature?” he said.
“I think Mrs. Clinton is a very respected woman, but she should really gather more correct information to base her statements on accurate information.”
The United States has been leading international efforts to subdue the threat posed by Iran’s suspect nuclear activities and Clinton praised Sunday the fourth round of sanctions imposed by the United Nations in June.
“They’re biting. And we hear that from many in the region and beyond,” she said.
“The information we’re getting is that the Iranian regime is quite worried about the impact on their banking system, on their economic growth because they’ve already encountered some tough economic times. And this is, you know, making it more costly.”
Ahmadinejad defiantly shrugged off such suggestions as he maintained that Iran’s economy was rock solid.
“These sanctions will definitively mark a new level of progress in our economy,” he told ABC News. “We have turned sanctions around and created opportunities out of this.”
Meanwhile, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell says neither the US nor Israel is likely to launch a military strike on Iran anytime soon.
Powell, who was also once the top US military officer, says he doesn’t think “the stars are lining up” for an attack on Iran’s known or suspected nuclear sites. The US accuses Iran of hiding plans to build a bomb; Iran denies that.
Powell also says international sanctions on Iran may never persuade Tehran to back off what it says is a legitimate nuclear energy program.
Powell says the US may have to accept that, while trying to deter Iran from building or using a bomb.
Meanwhile, Iran Iran denied on Sunday that border guards had detained seven US troops, calling the report “unfounded”, the state-run English language Press TV said.
The semi-official Fars news agency reported earlier in the day that border guards had detained seven US troops as they tried to illegally enter the Islamic state. The agency later withdrew the story, which had given no source.
Iran’s Arabic-language television al-Alam quoted Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, in charge of Iran’s border security, as denying that any such incident had happened in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan.
In Washington, a US Defense Department spokesman said: “Reports by state-run Iranian media that seven US soldiers were detained after crossing into Iran are false.”
A spokesman for NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, US Captain Ryan Donald, said no US soldiers were missing.
In another development, Ahmadinejad pressed Washington to release eight Iranians as a “humanitarian gesture” in an interview aired Sunday as freed American hiker Sarah Shourd returned home.
“Iran was the country that released Sarah. We haven’t even received a note from the United States on that,” Ahmadinejad complained in the interview with ABC’s “This Week,” calling her release “a huge humanitarian act.”
Shourd, 32, arrived at Dulles International Airport outside Washington days after being released on $500,000 bail by Iran, which is still holding two other American hikers, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, more than a year after they were detained along with Shourd.
“It would not be misplaced to ask that the US government should take a humanitarian gesture to release the Iranians who were illegally arrested and detained here in the United States,” Ahmadinejad said.
When asked if Iran would respond to an appeal by the mothers of the two remaining American hikers for their release, Ahmadinejad said their cases were in the hands of the judiciary.
“They violated the law,” he said. “Do you want violators to be released? Is that what you’re asking me?”
Iranian opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi has hit out at the growing political and financial might of the elite Revolutionary Guards, opposition website Kaleme.com reported on Sunday.
Karroubi was quoted as saying in a letter to ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani that late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini “prevented (the Guards) from entering into politics and the economy.”
But he warned that the decision by the authorities to allow the Guards to enter into both of these spheres was “very dangerous for itself and threatens the nation.”
Rafsanjani is an influential cleric who heads the Assembly of Experts that supervises the work of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is seen as sympathetic to Iran’s opposition.
Ahmadinejad also condemned as a “crime” attacks against France’s first lady Carla Bruni by a leading hardline newspaper which called her a “prostitute.”
In an interview published Sunday in the government newspaper Iran, Ahmadinejad said the attacks by the daily Kayhan, whose chief editor is appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were also against Islam.
“Certain things happen in our media which I do not believe in at all. For example, can a publication attribute a trait to the wife of a European president?” he was quoted as saying in a clear reference to Bruni.
“What kind of Islam allows that?” Ahmadinejad asked, adding such insults were “contrary to religion” and “a crime worse than a crime,” without naming Kayhan.
Iran has sentenced women’s rights activist Shiva Nazar-Ahari to six years in jail on charges including “warring against God”, an offence that can carry the death penalty, Sunday newspapers quoted her lawyer as saying.
She is the latest among the scores of activists picked up amid the mass protests that followed hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial re-election in June last year to receive a stiff jail sentence.
At least 10 of those arrested have been given death sentences.