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Iran Was on Edge; Now It's on Top
The war in Iraq has bolstered the regime's influence in the
region and made it bolder.
By Megan K. Stack and Borzou Daragahi
Times Staff Writers
02/18/06 "Los
Angeles Times" -- -- BAGHDAD — The Islamic
government in neighboring Iran watched with trepidation in March
2003 when U.S.-led troops stormed Iraq to overthrow Saddam
Hussein's regime and start remaking the political map of the
Mideast.
In retrospect, the Islamic Republic could have celebrated: The
war has left America's longtime nemesis with profound influence
in the new Iraq and pushed it to the apex of power in the
region.
Emboldened by its new status and shielded by deep oil reserves,
Tehran is pressing ahead with its nuclear program, daring the
international community to impose sanctions. Iran is a Shiite
Muslim nation with an ethnic Persian majority, and the
blossoming of its influence has fueled the ambitions of
long-repressed Shiites throughout the Arab world.
At the same time, Tehran has tightened alliances with groups
such as Hamas, which recently won Palestinian elections, and
with governments in Damascus and Beijing.
In the 1980s, Iran spent eight years and thousands of lives
waging a war to overthrow Hussein, whose regime buffered the
Sunni Muslim-dominated Arab world from Iran. But in the end, it
took the U.S.-led invasion to topple Iraq's dictator and allow
Iranian influence to spread through a chaotic, battle-torn
country.
Now Iraq's fledgling democracy has placed power in the hands of
the nation's Shiite majority and its Kurdish allies, many of
whom lived as exiles in Iran and maintain strong religious,
cultural and linguistic ties to it. The two groups sit atop most
of Iraq's oil, and both seek a decentralized government that
would give them maximum control of it. A weak central government
would also limit Sunni influence.
The proposed changes have aggravated ancient tensions between
the two branches of Islam, not to mention Arabs and Iranians.
Neighboring countries have historical and tribal links to Iraq's
Sunnis.
"A weak Iraq is now sitting next to a huge, mighty Iran. Now the
only counterpart to Iran is not a regional power, but a foreign
power like the United States," said Abdel Khaleq Abdullah, a
political analyst and television host in Dubai. "This is
unsustainable. It's bad for [Persian] Gulf security. It's given
Iran a sense of supremacy that we all feel."
Fear of a Shiite Iraq has helped shape the Sunni Arab world's
view of the insurgency in that country. Although many revile the
violence, there is also a quiet sense that the insurgents are
fighting on behalf of Sunnis, standing up for their sect in the
face of American and Iranian attempts to dominate Iraq.
Some Sunni extremists, jihadis from Yemen to Morocco, have been
drawn to Iraq to attack symbols of Shiite power.
"When they attack the Shiites, they think they are attacking the
Iranian influence," said Mustafa Alani, a counter-terrorism
expert at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "They think they're
attacking Iranian agents. To them, it's a legitimate target."
Though Iran owes much of its newfound strength to the war in
Iraq, that's not the only event that has benefited it. The U.S.
eliminated another foe, the Taliban regime in neighboring
Afghanistan, in 2001.
Meanwhile, hard-liners in Tehran centralized their power and
quashed dissent after winning control of the government in
elections that brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office
last year. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked
Congress this week to increase 2006 spending on promoting
democracy in Iran, to $85 million from $10 million.
Rising oil prices have deepened Iran's value as a strategic
partner and dramatically increased its assets.
Keenly aware that it is playing with a strong hand, Iran is
working to establish itself as a power to be reckoned with
beyond Iraq. The government's increasing confidence can be seen
in its aggressive insistence on the right to a nuclear program.
In 2003, when the secret program first became an international
controversy, Tehran sought to calm concerns with a conciliatory,
soft-spoken tone. Now talks with three European powers have
failed, and it is pressing ahead with uranium enrichment and
even hinting that it might pull out of the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty. It also has sharpened its rhetoric.
At a news conference in January, Foreign Ministry spokesman
Hamid Reza Asefi unleashed a torrent of sarcasm and taunts at
Europe. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was "ignorant," he
said, and French President Jacques Chirac "doesn't understand
democracy."
The possibility that Iran will develop nuclear weapons is
another worry for the Sunni-dominated Arab world.
When Jordan's King Abdullah II warned a year ago with
uncharacteristic bluntness that the emergence of a new
government in Iraq could create a "Shiite crescent," Shiites in
Iraq reacted angrily and Jordanian officials insisted the king
had been misunderstood.
But many analysts believe he meant exactly what he said: that a
fortified Iranian influence now stretches throughout Iraq,
through the Kurdistan region into Turkey, to an ever weaker
Syria and down into Lebanon's Hezbollah-dominated south, on
Israel's border. Iran's hand also stretches into the heart of
the Arabian peninsula through Shiite communities scattered in
the Persian Gulf countries.
The roots of distrust between Sunnis and Shiites are old, and
Persian rulers have vied for centuries with Arab and Ottoman
rivals. But until the invasion of Iraq, a solid bloc of Sunni
Arab governments ruled the northern and western coasts of the
gulf. Strong, oil-rich Iraq and Saudi Arabia were seen as
counterweights to Iran.
For many gulf Arabs, Iran is a long-feared boogeyman, quietly
coming to dominate Iraqi politics with an eye to controlling
those vast oil fields.
"We fought a war together to keep Iran from occupying Iraq. . .
. Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without
reason," Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal told the Council
on Foreign Relations in New York last year.
Sunni Arab leaders across the region worry about a lessening of
their power, wonder whether they've fallen out of favor with the
Americans, and fret over increasing threats to their dominance
over Shiites at home.
"The U.S. knows everything and they're allowing everything to
happen," said Adel Mawda, a Sunni sheik and legislator in
Bahrain's parliament. "They know very well the Sunnis have lost
a lot, and they are not defending them."
The example of Iraq has inspired many Shiites living under the
rule of Sunni governments to become more outspoken in demanding
their due.
In Saudi Arabia, the Shiite minority is concentrated in the
east, the same turf that covers the kingdom's vast oil reserves.
For Saudi Shiites, the war in Iraq has helped deliver increased
political participation and unprecedented religious freedoms.
For the first time, Shiites have been permitted to openly
celebrate the Shiite holiday of Ashura with traditional
processions.
Saudi Arabia is leery that Iran may diminish its importance as a
regional power broker, analysts say. They cite Riyadh's
involvement in trying to craft a compromise between Lebanon and
Syria as evidence that Saudi Arabia is working overtime to
establish its importance.
In tiny Bahrain, the example of Iraq has exacerbated tensions
between a disadvantaged Shiite majority and the ruling Sunni
minority. Shiites have taken to the streets in a series of
increasingly volatile demonstrations in recent months, and
sectarian fault lines have deepened.
"It's reached the point where the community wants to go to the
street, to make uprising, to make a revolution," said Sheik Ali
Salman, president of Bahrain's largest Shiite organization, Al
Wefaq. "Nobody wants it to happen. But when the government
doesn't want to deal with it, we can't promise it won't happen.
It's not in our hands."
Iran is also showing a more overt interest in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nurturing its long-standing ties
to the Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas militant groups.
President Ahmadinejad, like those groups, has called for the
destruction of the Jewish state.
The upset victory of Hamas in recent Palestinian elections also
promises to boost Tehran's regional role. If the United States
and the European Union back away diplomatically and withdraw
funding from the Palestinians, some analysts think Iran will
have an opportunity to fill in the void as a longtime supporter
of Hamas, gaining an unprecedented foothold in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Syria, internationally alienated over suspicions that it has
played a role in political assassinations in Lebanon, has also
been embraced by Iran. Just days after the slaying of former
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri plunged Syria into deeper
diplomatic distress, Tehran and Damascus announced a "united
front" to meet any threats.
There is long-standing kinship between the Shiite state and
Syria's ruling Allawite sect, an offshoot of Shiism. Analysts
describe the two countries, along with Hezbollah, as a defiant
coalition that finds common ground in its standoff with the
international community.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
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