"We viewed it as a provocative act. It is a dangerous situation and they should not have done it, pure and simple," Bush declared in his first public remarks on Sunday's incident in the Strait of Hormuz.

Shortly after he spoke, the Pentagon released a video and audio tape that appeared to confirm its charge that Iranian speedboats swarmed three US warships in the Strait and radioed a threat to blow them up.

"My message today to the Iranians is, they shouldn't have done what they did," he added. "I don't know what their thinking was, but I'm telling you what I think it was, I think it was a provocative act."

The video, which the Pentagon said was taken from the bridge of the destroyer USS Hopper, showed small blue-hulled boats approaching the warships and racing around the Hopper, the USS Port Royal and the USS Ingraham.

Amid a US sailor's urgent warnings to stay clear, a man's voice is heard in an audio recording declare in English: "I am coming to you ... You will explode in a few minutes."

The Pentagon has said that the speedboats were believed to belong to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard navy, but no Iranian flags or markings were apparent on them in the video tape. The US sailor in the video refers to them as five unidentified small craft.

Bush's comments came hours before he left on a week-long trip to the Middle East, focused partly on rallying US allies to Washington's position that Iran's suspect nuclear program poses a threat, despite a recent US intelligence finding that Tehran mothballed its atomic weapons program in 2003.

"One of the problems we have is that the intelligence report on Iran sent a mixed signal," said Bush, who has called for increased pressure on the Islamic republic to force it abandon sensitive nuclear work.

"Iran was a threat, Iran is a threat, and Iran will continue to be a threat if they are allowed to learn how to enrich uranium," he said. "We intend to work with our friends and allies to make that part of the world more secure."

Iran, which denounces Bush's trip as unnecessary meddling in the region, has denied US charges that patrol boats attached to its Revolutionary Guard had threatened to blow up American ships in the Strait.

"What happened between the Guards and foreign vessels was an ordinary identification," Ali Reza Tangsiri, commander of the Guards' naval forces in the region, told the Mehr news agency.

He added that the Guards' naval forces had a right to monitor and identify "any vessel entering Persian Gulf waters" to the northwest.

State television quoted an unnamed Guards source in the region as saying that "no threatening message was transmitted" in Sunday's incident.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino rejected Tehran's description of the naval incident as routine, stressing: "It was out of the ordinary, it was reckless. Our position is they should not do it again."

At the same time, Perino said Bush's goal in the Middle East was to promote newly revived peace talks and emphasized that forging a united front on Iran was "certainly not the main reason for the trip."

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the incident as "provocative" and "dangerous," amid fears such an isolated encounter could spark a major confrontation between the two foes.

Iran is "the single greatest threat to the kind of Middle East we all want to see," she added, in an interview, to the Jerusalem Post and the Ynet website.

But Iranian officials expressed bewilderment over the US version of events, saying the encounter was a routine question of identification that ended with nothing special to report.

Iranian media and analysts, expressing suspicion over the US version of events, described it as a propaganda stunt to tarnish Iran ahead of Bush's talks.

The Strait of Hormuz is a vital conduit for energy supplies, with about 20-25 percent of the world's crude oil supplies passing through from Gulf oil producers.

In March 2007, Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized 15 British sailors and marines in Gulf waters and held them at a secret location before releasing them in Tehran two weeks later.

Tehran and Washington have had no diplomatic links since 1980 when the United States cut relations amid a siege of the US embassy in Tehran by Islamist students that lasted 444 days.

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