Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hamid-Reza Assefi on Tuesday condemned the recent remarks by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as "blatant interference" in Iran's internal affairs. He said Washington is wrong if it believes that the U.S. system of government is the yardstick of democracy in the world and that other nations must alter their political structure according to the U.S. criteria.

Rumsfeld had on Monday indicated that Washington would resist the emergence of an Islamic system along the lines of the Iranian model in Iraq.

"I don't think I would characterize what's going on in Iran as a democratic system," he said at a Pentagon briefing.

Rumsfeld's remarks about the Iranian system of government could be analyzed from various angles. However, the political background of the U.S. official should be examined first.

Rumsfeld was the U.S. special envoy to Iraq in the 1980s and met Saddam Hussein at the height of the Iran-Iraq war. His visit was especially significant in that it resulted in Washington boosting its military, economic, and political support of Saddam, which reinforced the dictatorship and further fanned the flames of war with Iran. It is obvious that many U.S. officials, and Rumsfeld in particular, have been buddy-buddy with brutal dictators like Saddam.

The U.S. has a bleak record of supporting dictators such as Chile's Augusto Pinochet, the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko of the Congo (Zaire), and Suharto of Indonesia.

Taking all this into account, Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials should not dare to claim that they are champions of democracy. Furthermore, the U.S. defense secretary's remarks contradict earlier statements of certain U.S. officials, who have said that Iran is a democracy.

Rumsfeld's remarks seem even more unacceptable, considering that many countries lauded the democratic nature of Iran's political structure after several national elections, including the 1997 presidential election. Besides, the fact that Iran has held 24 elections since the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 is enough to give the lie to those remarks.

However, U.S. officials are too obsessed with the desire to interfere in the affairs of other nations to see the truth. In fact, White House hawks are using these baseless allegations to pursue their own goals.