Tehran - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has denounced the US-hosted Middle East peace conference in Annapolis as "unimportant and just US propaganda for Zionists (Israel)."His Culture Minister Safar Harandi even called the final declaration of the conference a "piece of useless torn paper."
Ahmadinejad was angry with Arab states for having ignored his call to boycott Annapolis as the "venue of another Zionist (Israeli) plot against Palestine."
The Iranian president was especially annoyed about the participation of Saudi Arabia and Syria in the conference.
"Iran had wished that Saudi Arabia would not have been on the conference list," Ahmadinejad told Saudi King Abdullah over the phone.
He also called his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad, but there were no reports about what the two discussed.
In an act of defiance, Iran has invited several radical Palestinian factions to come to Tehran next week to attend an "anti-Annapolis conference."
Tehran considers the Annapolis conference as "another futile effort" to strengthen the status of Israel in the Middle East.
"We have had such conferences in the past as well, but all of them failed - also this time there will be no achievement but another effort to undermine the rights of Palestinians," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini said.
For Ahmadinejad, who likes to fashion himself as frontman of the Islamic world in the struggle against the United States and Israel, the attendance of Arabs in Annapolis was a political disappointment.
"We (Arabs) prefer to settle the conflict rather than letting it escalate - talking is still better than shooting and for talking neither the US nor Israel can be ignored," an Arab diplomat in Tehran said.
Over the last three decades, Islamic Iran has several times realized that race and nationality are more important for the Arabs, especially if important political decisions on the Middle East are on the agenda, than religious commonalities.
Tehran however hopes that the new US initiative will fail - just like the Road Map peace plan - and that the Arab world will again forego the idea of compromise with arch-foe Israel.
"That will most probably be the case again, but Arabs and Palestinians can simply not follow the Iranian wishful thinking of an imminent collapse of Israel and must rather seek a more realistic solution for the dilemma," the Arab diplomat said.
