Iran warned Iraq on Sunday that an “intensely treacherous” United States habitually broke pacts like one it recently concluded on American troops quitting Iraq by 2011. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued the warning to Iraq's visiting Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, whose country last year reached the agreement on the pullout of US troops now numbering more than 140,000. Maliki met Khamenei in Tehran a few days after US forces in Iraq came under an Iraqi mandate, a move Maliki says restored sovereignty nearly six years after US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein. Khamenei “pointed at the American government's mischief and efforts to consolidate its domination and plunder the resources of the country,” state television said. Commenting on the US-Iraq security pact on US forces, Khamenei added: “The Americans are intensely treacherous and break pacts to the extent that they do not have real friendship even with their close allies in the region.” Khamenei, the Islamic Republic's top authority, repeated Iran's view that the presence of US and British forces was largely to blame for violence and other problems in Iraq.
