Iran said today any US military attack on the country would be a strategic mistake and dismissed the remarks as "psychological warfare".
US President George W. Bush last week said military action against Iran's nuclear programme had not been ruled out and vice president Mr Dick Cheney said Iran topped the list of world trouble spots and Israel could decide to bomb its nuclear facilities.
But Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Mr Hamid Reza Asefi said: "We think the chance (of a US military attack) is very low unless someone wants to make a major strategic mistake."
"Logically speaking, we don't think this is going to happen," he told a weekly news conference.
Iranian officials, including President Mohammad Khatami, said last week Iran would respond vigorously to any attack. Analysts have said Tehran has ballistic missiles capable of striking Israel or US bases in the Gulf and can easily stir up violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine through proxy agents and militant groups it backs.
Mr Asefi, echoing comments by other senior Iranian officials, dismissed the US remarks as "psychological warfare".
"These kind of remarks are clear examples of cultural and religious war which will only lead to people's hatred of US policies ... and will isolate America more than before," he said.
An article in The New Yorker magazine this month said the United States was conducting secret reconnaissance missions in Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets.
But Iranian Intelligence Minister Mr Ali Yunesi dismissed the report by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. "This person is crazy. He thinks Iran is chaotic and that whoever wants to enter the country, can easily do so," the ISNA students news agency quoted Yunesi as saying today.