Iran deflected accusations by Saudi Arabia and Israel that it was destabilising the Middle East, calling the two “US client states” who were trying to gloss over their “poor choices” and “strategic blunders”.
Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir joined Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in blaming Iran for rising regional tensions, at the Munich Security Conference on Sunday.
Jubeir called for “fundamental change in the Iranian regime” after Netanyahu labelled Iran as “the greatest threat to the world” and accused it of trying to impose an “empire” across the Middle East.
Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, said in his speech that criticism of his country’s policies in the Middle East had become “obsessive” and denied attempts to become a “hegemon.
“The US and its local clients in our region are suffering from the consequences of their own wrong choices,” said Zarif. “But they use this and other fora to revive the hysteria on Iran’s foreign policy and try to obscure its realities.”
According to Al Jazeera, Zarif’s list of such “poor choices” included backing US support for former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, the US invasion of Iraq to remove Hussein in 2003, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen.
The war of words came in the wake of the most serious confrontation between Israel and Iran in recent years, when Israel launched “large scale” raids against Iranian targets inside Syria on February 10, after accusing Tehran of sending an unmanned drone into its airspace from Syria.
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