"There are people who don't know how to do politics without having an enemy," said Lula, in reference to the US administration.

BRASILIA - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva hit out at the United States Thursday, challenging its muscular approach on Iran that sidelined diplomatic efforts he made this week to resolve the showdown.

Newspaper columnists "say that it was none of Brazil's business to be an intermediary with Iran. But who said it was a matter for the United States?" he asked after returning from an overseas tour that included Tehran.

"The blunt truth is, Iran is being presented as if were the devil, that it doesn't want to sit down" to negotiate.

To the contrary, said Lula, "Iran decided to sit down at the negotiating table. It wants to see if the others are going to go along with what (it) has done."

"There are people who don't know how to do politics without having an enemy," said Lula, in reference to the US administration.

The remarks to reporters in Brasilia came three days after Lula and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran to secure a deal meant to stave off UN sanctions the United States is pushing for.

Initially hailed as diplomatic master stroke, the deal fell by the wayside on Tuesday when the United States submitted a UN resolution calling for a new round of sanctions against Iran, saying the Tehran agreement was insufficient.

Brazil and Turkey, the two non-permanent members of the UN Security Council most opposed to the resolution, immediately sent a letter calling for the resolution to be dropped and their deal to be considered.

Lula said he believed his contribution upheld the spirit of multilateralism.

"We went to Iran and we succeeded, after 18 hours of meetings... to get Iran to do what the UN Security Council had been asking it to do for the past six months," he said.

He also highlighted the case of a young French teacher, Clotilde Reiss, accused of being a French spy by Iran, who was released to return home during his visit to Tehran, although he stopped short of saying that was a bargaining chip in the deal negotiations.

"We were talking for four and half months to get her freed. Nobody knew that, except us," Lula said.

Meanwhile, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that fresh UN sanctions would underscore Iran's isolation.

While previous UN resolutions had failed to alter Tehran's policy, "the ratcheting up of what other countries are willing to do on their own using the resolution as a basis does have the potential to change behavior."

"If the resolution did not have an impact in Iran, it's not clear to me why the Iranians would have made -- are making and have been making such an extraordinary effort to prevent it from being passed," Gates said.

"If it were irrelevant as far as they were concerned, I don't think you'd see them expending the kind of diplomatic and other kinds of energy to try and prevent its passage."

The fourth round of sanctions would include measures against Iran's banking sector, according to a US official in New York.

Gates said "the resolution provides a new legal platform that allows individual countries and organizations, such as the EU, to take significantly more stringent actions on their own that go way beyond, well beyond what the UN resolution calls for in and of itself."