IRAN - The Issue Of US Military Presence Next Door.

While Washington's military campaign in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq have been seen by some as designed in part to intimidate Iran, Tehran has actually emerged as a winner, according to regional observers. Anatol Lieven, an analyst at the New America Foundation, recently wrote that Iran's "two greatest regional enemies", the Baathist government in Iraq and the Sunni extremist regime in Afghanistan, "were both smashed without Iran having to fire a shot". He added: "Now, it has governments in Afghanistan and still more in Iraq that are basically very sympathetic to Tehran and Tehran's view of regional affairs" - an observation given more force by recent festivities in Tehran.

Although Iran suddenly found some 140,000 US troops just next door, that was not necessarily as daunting as the American hawks had thought it might be. Iran's unspoken potential to make life more difficult for many of its new and already over-stretched US neighbours has always given it a certain amount of leverage.

In recent weeks, Iran has found its position getting stronger, sometimes even with President George Bush's seemingly unwitting assistance. The Bush administration's agreement last week to sell India advanced nuclear technology despite Delhi's boycott of the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), for example, has created the perception of a double standard which Iran is likely to use to its advantage both in negotiations with the EU3 and in fending off US efforts to get the UN Security Council to impose sanctions against it for allegedly violating the NPT.

Inter Press Service (IPS) on July 22 quoted Arjun Makhijani, director of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, as saying: "Iran will argue how can it be penalized for minor transgressions of the NPT, which it has signed, when India, a nuclear power, gets full nuclear cooperation from the US when it is not even a member".

Joseph Cirincione, a proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International peace, asked: "How can you argue that Russia can't sell [nuclear] reactors to Iran after this?", adding: "That's what Iran is going to count on".

Bush approved the nuclear deal as part of a diplomatic effort to promote India as "a major world power in the 21st century" and as a counterweight to China - whose growing demonisation by Republicans in Congress and Sinophobes in the Pentagon helps Iran by diverting attention to an even bigger "threat". But conferring on India regional superpower status to contain China may further shield Tehran, which has long-standing and close ties to New Delhi, from Washington's more aggressive designs.

The fact that Premier Manmohan Singh and his delegation, despite having been given the red carpet treatment at the White House last week, reportedly rejected all appeals to reconsider their support for the proposed multi-billion-dollar "peace pipeline" to pump Iranian natural gas to India via Pakistan offered clear evidence that Delhi had no intention of acting as Washington's pawn on the global chessboard. Rajan Menon, a foreign-policy expert at Lehigh University, said: "The Indians will not be corralled into any kind of containment policy regarding China and Iran, but especially Iran".

Given the strength of its own relationship with Iran and its large Muslim population, Menon said, "the US would risk a break with India if it actually attacked Iran". The fact that Iran is a major oil exporter at a time of record prices - in part due to the instability in US-occupied Iraq - and growing great-power competition for energy resources is key factor in Tehran's increasing clout.

In addition to India, China, which late last year signed a 25-year, $100 billion gas deal with Iran, has a great deal invested in Iran's stability. Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University who advised former President Jimmy Carter on the National Security Council, was on July 22 quoted by IPS as saying: "China sees Iran as a very important part of its energy strategy, and it's powerful enough to stand up with them if they need support at the UN Security Council. For its part, Iran sees China as a potentially very valuable ally". Nor is it just China.

Russia, which backs Iran's civilian nuclear programme, is likely to support Iran at the Security Council, less for love of Tehran than because it has become increasingly alienated from Washington over the past year, according to Wayne White, director of the Middle East Institute (MEI) and a former top State Department expert on the Gulf.

That alienation was on display earlier in July when Russia and China encouraged the four other Central Asia members of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) to call on Washington to set a deadline for withdrawing from military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan - both SCO states. The bases, which have been used to support US military and intelligence operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq and which some have suggested could be used in similar ways against Iran, was widely seen as the opening shot by Moscow and Beijing in a concerted effort to roll back strategic gains made by Washington in Central Asia immediately after 9/11.

Menon said: "Without even having orchestrated some master plan, Iran is sitting pretty in Central Asia at the moment". He recalled that Russia and Iran helped broker a peace accord ending the civil war in Tajikistan in 1994, and said: "It's a multipolar region, and the fact that we're having problems with so many players gives the Iranians a lot more running room".

The rapidly fading likelihood that Turkey will be admitted to the EU in the wake of the French and Dutch rejection of the EU constitution, as well as growing concerns in Ankara about both Kurdish unrest in a weakened Syria and its own Kurdish insurgency, offers yet another opening to woo a key neighbour whose alliance with Washington has been under unprecedented strain for more than two years (see this week's News Service in news4cTurkeyJuly25-05).

These diplomatic advances have contributed to growing self-confidence inside Iran, particularly among the new generation of leaders, including Ahmadi-Nejad, who "have grown up with the idea that Iran makes its own decisions and takes its own path regardless of what outsiders think", according to Sick, who said: "From inside Iran, there's a sense that everything is breaking for us. What I worry about is that they will conclude that they don't need to worry so much about compromise, and that could be very dangerous. They do still have to think about their neighbors, which at this point includes the US".