IRAN - The Challenges Of Terrorism - Part 4A - Iran & The Main Regional Issues.

Despite the best efforts of the administration of US President George W. Bush to make Iran an international pariah, the Shiite theocracy keeps wracking up one diplomatic victory after another. On all regional issues affecting Iran, Tehran seems to have gained some advantage.

One month after the polling victory of an ultra-conservative figure, President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, Iran finds itself in a much stronger position to resist the US campaign to isolate it as part of a strategy of "regime change". To begin with, there is the situation in Iraq which is one of the main regional issues affecting Tehran.

The Iraq Issue: The July 16-18 visit by US-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Al-Ja'fari to Tehran, where he was warmly received by the regime's top religious and government officials, was only the latest, albeit the most spectacular, of a series of events which underlined Iran's growing leverage. There is a consensus among Iraq specialists that Ja'fari, a devout Shiite Arab who heads a faction of the Islamist Al-Da'wa Party, would not have been able to undertake the visit without an American green light of some kind. This is despite the fact that theocrats in Iran still call the US "The Great Satan".

It will take sometime before the implications of Ja'fari's Tehran visit have become clear. The visit followed a series of high-level meetings between the defence ministers of the two countries and produced a military co-operation accord, among other agreements signed by the two governments. Not much has been said about the military co-operation agreement other than what the Sunni Arab Defence Minister, Sa'doun Al-Dulaimi, said he had discussed with his Iranian counterpart during his recent visit to prepare for Ja'fari's trip.

According to the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat, Dulaimi had offered Tehran a pledge that Iraqi soil will not be used as a base for any US attack on Iran. The paper said Dulaimi had also affirmed that Baghdad "is not a part of any American enmity towards Tehran". Citing sources close to Premier Ja'fari, Al-Hayat said that Dulaimi's consultations in Tehran concerned in part a better Iranian policing of the border so as to prevent the infiltration of militants into Iraq. The paper said Dulaimi also discussed an "Iranian role in training Iraqi armed forces". (The Iranian Revolutionary Guards did train the Badr Brigades, the main militia of the Iraqi Shiite Arab community. Badr is part of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq - SCIRI - which is one of the main parties in Ja'fari's coalition government. Iraq's interior minister, for example, is a SCIRI man).

That Ja'fari's visit included a prayerful pilgrimage to the tomb of Imam Khomeini, the founder of the Shiite theocracy and arch-foe of the "Great Satan" itself, must have stuck deeply in the craw of neo-conservatives (neo-cons) and other hawks in Washington who had long assumed that a "liberated" Iraq would gratefully co-operate in ousting the mullahs in Tehran.

However, there have been hints that Ja'fari's visit might be an opening for renewed dialogue towards a US-Iran compromise deal to resolve the nuclear issue peacefully. Negotiations between Iran and the EU3 (France, Germany and the UK) over the nuclear issue are to be resumed shortly. But APS sources discount the possibility of a deal with the US, which suspects that Iran's aim is to produce nuclear weapons - a grave development Washington is bent on preventing.