Manama - Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Saturday that his country was willing to help the US withdraw from Iraq, but he would not elaborate on how they planned to do that before the US officially decided to pull its troops out.
Mottaki's offer came as the Gulf countries and Iraq called on Iran to be more transparent about its nuclear program ambitions, to ensure that it is not of a military nature.
The United States should help itself before anybody else help them, he said in a press conference after addressing the third International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) regional security summit, the so-called Manama Dialogue.
'The Baker-Hamilton report shows how important and dangerous the latest developments in Iraq are,' Mottaki said, referring to the report handed to the White House last week by former US Secretary of State James Baker III and foreign policy expert Lee Hamilton.
'It only reveals half of the truth and shows the wrongful policies of the Americans in Iraq,' he added.
Mottaki, who cited the report several times, added that any help from his country would not come before the US commits to changing its policies in Iraq.
'One of the recommendations of the report is to pull the troops out of Iraq, and we believe that doing so will help resolve at least 50 per cent of the problems,' he said.
Despite blaming the US and claiming that the Americans did not see a political will to withdraw, Mottaki did admit that the terrorists' presence in Iraq presented the other major cause of instability.
Mottaki repeated his country's refusal to have outside military assistance to help with the region's defence, arguing that security should be collectively established by the regional countries.
He also defended Iran's nuclear programmes, calling them peaceful and repeating Tehran's insistence that it is not seeking nuclear arms.
'We do not believe in or need nuclear weapons, the time of nuclear weapons is over,' he said.
'If nuclear weapons could prevent any crisis, it would have prevented the collapse of the former Soviet Union or it would have helped the recent aggression of the Zionist regime against Lebanon,' Mottaki said, using Tehran's term for Israel.
Mottaki added that the only country in the region that represent a nuclear threat was the Zionist entity because it possesses nuclear weapons.
His comments came while the Irai, Bahraini and Kuwaiti foreign ministers told the IISS parley that they did not object to Iran's nuclear programme, but called for more transparency to ensure that it is peaceful in nature.
Saudi Arabia's top intelligence chief had said late Friday that Israel's nuclear arsenal was the biggest threat to the region's short-term and medium-term security.
Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the Saudi kingdom's chief of general intelligence, also blamed Israel for driving other countries in the region to pursue weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
'This will also force moderate countries in the region that adopt a WMD-free policy to establish clandestine or declared nuclear programmes to defend their interests and create a military balance,' he said in the keynote address to IISS.
The Bahrain meeting, which comes just two days after the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan US panel, presented 79 recommendations to improve the Iraq situation and begin a US withdrawal, is being attended by high-level representatives from more than 20 countries, including Iran, Iraq and the United States.
Both sides will get a chance to state their position as the US and Iran were set to address the meeting Saturday.
The US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari were scheduled to address the meeting later Saturday.
This year's meeting in Manama, in which some 200 delegates are participating, also has representatives from Turkey, India, Japan, and China.
The London-based IISS, established in 1958 by individuals interested in maintaining civilized international relations in the nuclear age, is one the world's leading think-tanks on political- military conflicts.
