Iranian leadership yesterday branded the United States a “decaying power,” brushing off Washington’s call for strong UN Security Council action to stop the Islamic regime’s controversial nuclear drive. The tough rhetoric came after the government also dismissed a personal appeal from UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed El-Baradei to freeze uranium enrichment and calm suspicions it is seeking the atomic bomb. “The enemy should know Iran is not comparable to any country in the world. Now we are much more powerful than before,” senior cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati told worshippers at Friday prayers in Tehran. “The United States is a decaying power. Don’t be intimidated by their threats. They don’t have the stamina to do anything,” said the head of Iran’s Guardian Council, a powerful political watchdog. Iran’s president said yesterday that the existence of the “Zionist regime,” Iran’s term for Israel, was a threat to the Islamic world, days after declaring Iran had become a nuclear power by enriching uranium. But the tone of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech to a conference on the Palestinian issue was slightly more moderate than fiery rhetoric last year, when Iran’s official IRNA news agency quoted him as telling a conference: “Israel must be wiped off the map.”
“The existence of the Zionist regime is tantamount to an imposition of an unending and unrestrained threat so that none of the nations and Islamic countries of the region and beyond can feel secure from its threat,” Ahmadinejad said yesterday. He said it was up to all “genuine Palestinians” to hold a referendum and decide on a political system.