"I would advise them to first get out of their quagmire in Iraq before getting into an even bigger one," General Safavi said with a grin. "We have American forces in the region under total surveillance. For the past two years, we have been ready for any scenario, whether sanctions or an attack."
At a Friday prayer sermon in Tehran, senior cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Janati simply branded the US as a "decaying power" lacking the "stamina" to block Iran's ambitions. And hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told AFP that a US push for tough United Nations sanctions was of "no importance." "She is free to say whatever she wants," the president replied when asked to respond to comments by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice highlighting part of the UN charter that provides for sanctions backed up by the threat of military action. "We give no importance to her comments," he said with a broad smile.
On Thursday, Rice said that faced with Iran's intransigence, the United States "will look at the full range of options available to the United Nations." "There is no doubt that Iran continues to defy the will of the international community," Rice said, after Iran also dismissed a personal appeal from the UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei.