The White House said Friday that U.S. President George W. Bush has authorized U.S. forces in Iraq to take whatever actions are necessary to counter Iranian agents deemed a threat to American troops or the public at large - a sign of a more assertive policy to push back on Iran on that front.

Later Friday, former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani accused the United States of stepping up its confrontation with Iran on several fronts and seeking to undermine his country's economy.

The comments by Rafsanjani, a powerful figure in Iran's clerical leadership, came as the United States has vowed to take greater action to roll back Iranian influence across the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Lebanon.

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Bush blasted Iran in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, accusing it of backing Shiite extremists in Iraq and the Shiite Hezbollah group in Lebanon, as well as of seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

The United States is also bolstering its military presence in the Gulf as a signal to Iran, sending a second aircraft carrier to the region and deploying Patriot missiles. The deployment has alarmed Iranian leaders, who have stepped up warnings to the Iranian public that the U.S. might attack.

In a Friday prayer sermon at a Tehran mosque, Rafsanjani told worshippers, "Today our enemies have come with several issues against us while having supporters in the world communities. This is bullying."

He said the ultimate aim is to force Iran to abandon nuclear energy and ignore our legal right to a nuclear program. Tehran insists its nuclear program is peaceful and has come under UN sanctions for refusing to suspend its uranium enrichment program.

He said the U.S. military buildup aimed to make Iran worry about a possible U.S. attack.

"This is a ominous plan to frighten our nation and affect life of our nation; to weaken investment, to weaken production, to make people to hide their wealth," said Rafsanjani while urging authorities to pay more attention to people.

The cleric said Iran should counter the U.S. campaign with a psychological war in their home. He did not elaborate.

Ranfsanjani, who was president from 1989-1997, is head of Iran's Expediency Council, a powerful clerical body, and a top rival to hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Seen as a relative moderate, Rafsanjani lost to Ahmadinejad in 2005 elections but his supporters scored a major victory over Ahmadinejad's in city elections late last year.

Exiled Iranian opposition group says thousands of Iranian agents in Iraq
Iran has thousands of paid operatives working in neighboring Iraq, an Iranian opposition group based in France said Friday, and it released the names of nearly 32,000 people it alleged were involved.

The National Council of Resistance's allegations could not be independently verified. And a press officer at the Iranian Embassy in Paris, speaking on condition of anonymity because of embassy policy, called the claims completely false and said Tehran supports stability in the region.

The council is the political wing of the People's Mujahedeen of Iran, which advocates the overthrow of Iran's Islamic government. The council has been based in France since shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, who heads the council's foreign affairs committee, alleged that thousands of Iraqis are working on Iran's behalf.

The clerical regime, faced with intensifying domestic crisis and isolation inside Iran, views its only chance for survival in the establishment of a proxy regime in Iraq, Mohaddessin said at a news conference in Paris.

The council released the names, alleged dates of recruitment by Iran and the supposed salaries of 31,690 Iraqis. It claimed that most were paid by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qods Force - a faction of the Iranian military that the U.S. military says bankrolls militants in Iraq and equips them with weapons.

It said that in Iraq, the alleged operatives were mostly affiliated with the Badr Brigade, the Iranian-trained military wing of Iraq's most powerful Shiite political group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Mohaddessin said the list was compiled in 2003 and 2004 by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and obtained by the council's sources within it, declining to elaborate. He alleged that most of those named were still working on Iran's behalf.