Iranian mullah Mohammad Khatami and Nancy Pelosi agree: Iran’s Khatami urges US pullout from Iraq.

LONDON (AFP) - A US troop pullout from Iraq would be a “major step” towards restoring stability there, Iran’s former president has said, lamenting that US policies in the Middle East have fueled radicalism worldwide.

Mohammad Khatami also voiced regret at a “wall of misunderstanding” between the United States and Tehran, which Washington accuses of wanting to build nuclear weapons.

In an interview with BBC radio, he said that former US president Bill Clinton had taken steps to restore ties between Washington and the Islamic Republic in the 1990s, when Khatami was in office in Tehran.

“Unfortunately after president Clinton and the Republicans taking over there has been an agressive policy and the American policies in Iraq and other regions has contributed further to this misunderstanding,” he said Thursday.

“I hope that American experience through its policies which has contributed to great fundamentalism and extremism in the world would be an experience to reconsider its policies.”

I’m sure it’s just coincidence that this sounds exactly like almost any Democrat candidate’s canned speech.

And get a load of this:

Khatami is on a four-day visit to Britain. On Tuesday, he was given an honorary degree by Saint Andrew’s University in Scotland, while on Wednesday he delivered a keynote address to London’s Chatham House thinktank.

While Khatami cons the gullible British chattering classes, Iran is flexing its muscles in war games named after Islam’s prophet Mohammed: Iran in first firing of longer-range missiles on exercise.

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran has fired its longer-range Shahab-3 ballistic missile on exercise for the first time as it began 10 days of war games amid a mounting standoff with the West over its nuclear programme.

The hardline Revolutionary Guards fired the missiles, which have a range of up to 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) — sufficient to threaten US bases in the Gulf — during the first phase of the manoeuvres in the central desert, state television reported.

“Shahab missiles, carrying cluster warheads, with a range of 2,000 kilometres, were fired from the desert near (Iran’s clerical capital) Qom,” it said Thursday.

“Dozens of Shahab-2 and -3, Zolfaghar-73, Scud B, Fath-110 and Zelzal have been launched in the presence of (Guards chief) General Yahya Rahim Safavi, and other high-ranking commanders,” the television said. “The cluster head of the Shahab-2 has the capability to disperse 1,400 bomblets with great destructive power.”

It was the first time that Iran had fired the longer-range Shahab-3 on exercise and commanders said they would also be employing other “new equipment” during the war games.

Dubbed Great Prophet 2, the air, land and sea manoeuvres are to extend across 14 provinces “with the focus on the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” Safavi said Wednesday.