Khamenei: West trying to spread 'Iranophobia'

The West is trying but failing to instil "Iranophobia," Iran's supreme leader said Thursday in remarks that appeared to be prompted by, but did not directly address, US allegations of a thwarted Tehran-sponsored assassination plot. "The repeat of ineffective and stupid methods by hapless and distracted policymakers in the West (to spread) Iranophobia will again bear no result," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in an army base in the western city of Kermanshah, the official IRNA news agency reported. "They will once again taste failure's bitterness," he said Khamenei added that Iran's arch-foe, the United States, was caught in a "quagmire" of its own creation because of its "wrong policies and performance." The all-powerful leader did not explicitly respond to US allegations that Iranian government officials were behind a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington. His remarks were made just before US President Barack Obama demanded accountability from the top levels of the Iranian government over the alleged plot. In separate comments, the commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards -- whose Quds Force special operations unit was implicated in the alleged plot -- said Western animosity towards the Islamic republic was only "natural" because of his country's achievements. "Today Iran faces foreign and domestic enemies.... But these animosities are natural... because of the Islamic revolution's achievements in various fields," Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said in the city of Khoramabad, Mehr news agency reported. Like Khamenei, Ali Jafari did not directly address the US accusations levelled at Iran. US officials on Tuesday said they had charged two Iranians, one of them a dual US citizen, with preparing to carry out a bomb attack on the Saudi envoy under a plan "conceived, sponsored and directed from Iran." The US Justice Department accused the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force of being involved based on testimony given by one of the Iranians who was in US custody. The other Iranian, said to be a member of the Quds Force, was at large and believed to have left the United States, according to US authorities.