Rouhani rejects Trump talks; Iraq sends teams to US, Iran

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani rejected talks with the United States on Tuesday, after President Donald Trump said Iran would call and ask for negotiations “if and when they are ever ready.”

Meanwhile, Iraq will send delegations to Washington and Tehran to help “halt tension,” Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said on Tuesday.

“Today’s situation is not suitable for talks and our choice is resistance only,” state news agency IRNA quoted Rouhani as saying.

Trump said on Monday that Iran would be met with “great force” if it attempted anything against US. interests in the Middle East. He said reports Washington was trying to set up talks were false, but “Iran will call us if and when they are ever ready.”

“Right after threatening Iran, they were forced to say they do not seek a war,” Rouhani said in televised remarks on Tuesday. “Iranians will never bow to a bully.”

Rouhani said the country faced “economic war,” and the government needed more powers to control the economy.

Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili said courts had sentenced 10 businessmen to up to 20 years in jail on charges including “economic sabotage,” the semi-official news agency Fars reported on Tuesday.

Iran executed at least three businessmen for economic crimes last year.

French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said the Iranian threats were not helpful: “I do not think that Europe will get drawn into this idea of an ultimatum,” Le Maire told reporters.

Iraq is one of the few countries with close relations with both the United States and Iran, which each have helped it fight against Daesh militants.

Washington abruptly pulled non-essential staff from its embassy in Baghdad last week, citing a threat from Iran-backed militias in Iraq.

Abdul Mahdi said there were no Iraqi groups that wanted to push towards a war, two days after a rocket fired in Baghdad landed close to the US Embassy, the latest in a series of regional attacks the United States believes may have been inspired by Iran.

No one has claimed responsibility for the rocket fired into the heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses government buildings and diplomatic missions, on Sunday.

US government sources said Washington strongly suspects Shiite militias with ties to Tehran were behind the rocket attack.

Iran has rejected allegations of involvement in attacks.

Analysts say third parties may seek to exploit the latest spike in tensions between Tehran and Washington to spark a showdown that serves their own interests.

Iraq “pays a disproportionate tax on Iranian-American tensions and (has) an unenviable frontline position in any future conflict between the two,” said Fanar Haddad, an Iraq expert at the National University of Singapore.

For Iraqi political analyst Essam Al Fili, the rocket attack was a sign that some sides want to pull Tehran and Washington into a confrontation in Shiite-majority Iraq.

“There are those who want to fight Iran with other people’s weapons, and those who want to fight the US with other people’s weapons,” he said.

But he added that Iran has “so far favoured restraint in Iraq, a country which is vulnerable on the security front.”

Analyst Karim Bitar stressed that “the stakes are so high that Iranian proxies cannot act without an explicit green light” from Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard force.

Tehran and Washington “know perfectly well that it’s an unwinnable war and that an all-out confrontation would be devastating for both the US and Iran,” said Bitar, an expert at France’s Institute for International and Strategic Affairs.

But, he added, “the inflammatory rhetoric of the past few weeks plays right into the hands of Iran’s hardliners” as well as pleasing Saudi Arabia and Israel, “bent on settling old scores with Iran.”

“There won’t be a direct war. The United States is counting on a collapse of the (Iranian) economy, which could be accompanied by limited air strikes,” said Iraqi political scientist Hashem Al Hashemi.

He said Washington may also urge Israel to carry out air strikes against Iran’s militia allies in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

“The US foreign policy and security establishment knows full well that attacking Iran would make the Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya wars look like walks in the park,” Bitar said.

Agencies