The US must abandon efforts to undermine Iran's clerical establishment if it wants to see an improvement in ties between the two countries, an Iranian minister was quoted as saying on Saturday.
Officials in both countries have hinted at a possible thaw in their decades-old enmity in recent days after Washington sent humanitarian aid and temporarily lifted banking restrictions on donations for victims of the devastating earthquake in the Iranian city of Bam.
But Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi, speaking to a group of local journalists, said problems between the two arch foes would not be resolved until Washington changed its stance on Iran.
"The most important issue in Iran-US relations is that America should abandon its enmity toward Iran," the ISNA student news agency quoted him as saying.
"The American government up to now hasn't really accepted the existence of the Islamic Republic and the present [US] government in particular has always tried to weaken and overthrow the Islamic Republic," he said.
As examples Yunesi pointed to US President George W. Bush's branding of Iran as a member of an "axis of evil" along with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq and US funding of Persian language radio stations beamed into Iran.
"It's obvious that American leaders have security problems with us and as long as that stance remains no problems will be solved," he said.
Washington broke ties with Tehran in 1980 while radical Iranian students were holding 52 hostages seized when they stormed the US Embassy in Tehran shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The hostages were freed after 444 days.
US officials have said they want Iran to hand over arrested al-Qaeda members. They accuse Iran of seeking nuclear weapons and backing Palestinian militant groups which attack Israel. Iran denies all the allegations.
Bush has welcomed Iran's willingness to allow humanitarian flights into the country after the quake and US officials have said they may restart talks held in Geneva in the runup to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the US State Department said on Friday Iran had declined a US offer to send a humanitarian mission to Bam led by Senator Elizabeth Dole.
State Department spokesman Adam Ereli insisted the proposed visit had no political undertones but another State Department official said it was meant as a positive signal to Tehran.
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