TEHRAN, March 23 (UPI) -- Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi asked the United Nations not to remain a marginal force and to perform its duties in urging what he called the invading forces to end aggression on Iraq, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported Sunday.
"Unfortunately, even the most primitive human and ethical rules are being violated in the course of the war," Kharrazi said.
Expressing concern over the possibility of the expansion of war and the increasing of the number of civilian casualties, Kharrazi said "The defenseless, oppressed Iraqi nation are now under heavy attacks of the invading forces from the air, sea and land."
Iranian leaders, including President Mohammad Khatami, have repeatedly said that Iran's objection to the U.S.-led military action in Iraq does not mean support for the Iraqi regime.
"Our objection to this illegitimate war is objecting to an attack against an Islamic country, to the broad violation of the international laws, and to laying the foundation of an unhealthy method in international relations that can lead to the emergence of a chaotic world in which force dictates the rules," Kharrazi said, stressing that, due to Iraqi regime's conduct, his country had suffered "far more losses than any other country."
In a harsh criticism of the U.S-led war on Iraq, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Friday called the U.S. leaders a "stupid lot" who had launched one of the "dirtiest wars" without "taking into account any humanitarian principles."
He condemned the military action in neighboring Iraq as a "symbol of the emergence of a new Hitlerism in the history," accusing the United States of seeking full control of Iraq's rich oil reserves as well as political, cultural and military dominance of the region.
Despite a long brutal war between the two neighbors in 1980's during which Iraqi troops used poison gases against Iranian soldiers, Iran has even said that the U.S. presence in Iraq is "worse than Saddam's weapons of mass destruction."
Analysts say that Iran's sources of concern mainly include the uncertainties that exist over a post-Saddam Iraq as well as the fear that its western neighbor might be put under U.S. military rule for any sustained period of time.
"We are clearly in favor of disarming Saddam of weapons of mass destruction, but we are equally opposed to U.S. presence in the region," Iran's influential former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was quoted as having said recently.
In January last year, President George W. Bush lumped Iran, Iraq and North Korea, into an "axis of evil," accusing the Islamic republic of sponsoring state terrorism and seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
