WASHINGTON, April 15 (UPI) -- An Iranian government delegation was in Iraq Thursday apparently to help negotiate an end to the Shiite insurrection. The group was led by Hossein Sadeghi of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, and its mission was reported by the Iranian official news agency IRNA, thus bringing out into the open Tehran's covert interest in shaping the course of developments in its chaotic neighbor.
The two countries share a common religion -- Shiite Islam -- and Iran's main lines of communication are religious, which in Iran is synonymous with political, but not in Iraq - yet in any case. The visiting Iranians will consult with Iraqi clerics, and members of the Iraqi Governing Council, IRNA said, but makes no mention of meetings with U.S. officials.
Washington broke off diplomatic ties with Iran after Iranian revolutionaries occupied the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 American staff members hostage for 444 days. But since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, back channels of communication have been opened as each side has striven to reassure the other. On the U.S. side, this has meant calming the Iranian regime's nerves that it might be next in line for an American incursion. On the Iranian side, it meant trying to dispel U.S. suspicions that the regime is plotting with fundamentalist groups in Iraq's Shiite majority to set up an Iranian-style, essentially anti-American government controlled by its clerics.
The Iranians have indicated that contacts with Washington have recently broken down. Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Wednesday that while there had been "dialogue" with the United States about Iraq, "currently it has stopped because we felt we were going nowhere. The Americans give promises, but don't keep their promises." Kharrazi gave no details -- the admission of contacts in itself was unusual enough -- but one known disputed incident was the recent U.S. decision to expel the Iranian charge d'affaires in Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi Qomi. According to Arab sources, the Americans believed that he headed Iranian intelligence in Iraq.
There is also escalating disagreement over cross-border traffic. Every day between 14,000 and 15,000 Iranian pilgrims travel to Iraq to visit Shiite shrines. Under pressure from the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, the newly formed Iraqi police have imposed tighter screening at the Iran-Iraq frontier to block access to suspected intelligence agents, guerrillas, members of the Quds (Jerusalem) Unit of the Revolutionary Guards, and other undesirables who could foment more mayhem in Iraq.
In reality, some of the more aggressive members of the Bush administration, flushed with the military success of the Iraq invasion and unable to find the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein was supposed to have stashed, did talk seriously of tackling neighboring Iran, which did have a nuclear program. But Britain, France, and Germany quickly stepped in and persuaded the Iranians to submit to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran, on the other hand, has sent mixed signals about its interest in Iraq, reflecting the deep divisions in its own government. It is widely believed that the ruling fundamentalist ayatollahs are fanning violence, bloodshed and chaos in Iraq. Why? Safa Haeri, writing in the Asia Times says the Iranian regime "is vehemently afraid of the emergence of a democratic Iraq on its troubled borders, and for that reason is pulling every string at its disposal."
In this scenario, one of the strings is Moqtada Sadr. For a long time the fiery Iraqi Shiite cleric who is behind the Shiite insurrection against U.S. troops was lukewarm towards Iran, but Arab diplomatic sources in Washington said he became a fierce supporter of an Iranian style Islamic republic in his own country after visiting Iran last year and receiving promises of financial and military support from the regime in return for giving the Americans as much trouble as possible.
Iranian reformers led by President Muhammad Khatami have favored support for the more moderate approach of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Iraqi Shiite majority opinion. Sistani is opposed to violence because he believes that the Shiites, who make up more than 60 percent of the total Iraqi population, have numbers on their side and will eventually gain control in a free election. Iran's two-track approach, though growing out of rivalry rather than cooperation, has its advantages for Tehran, which still is not certain what to make of the situation.
Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the second most powerful cleric after the spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a former two-term president, said in his weekly sermon Friday that the U.S. occupation of Iraq was both "an opportunity and threat, for this wounded giant, blessed with all the huge possibilities it possesses, can take very dangerous actions that would cost itself and others dearly. But if it is taught a lesson (in Iraq), neither the United States nor any other superpower would ever think of engaging in military adventures by occupying other nations."
In other words, a U.S. failure in Iraq would be a lesson for the superpower, but the risk is that the fallout of that failure could endanger Iraq's neighbors and the region as a whole.
In his sermon Rafsanjani -- himself once considered a reformer -- did not endorse Moqtada Sadr's tactics and the violence it has produced in Iraq, but had words of praise for Sadr's Mehdi Army as a movement of "enthusiastic, heroic young people" who "contribute to the security of the nation."
The Arab sources quoted earlier give Iranian agents some of the credit -- if that's what it is -- for creating a Sunni-Shiite alliance against U.S. forces, something U.S. authorities had predicted would never happen. But the sources said that cohesion could backfire for Tehran because it signaled that Iraqi nationalism was not dead.
"Every Iraqi -- every Arab -- is aware that Iranians are not Arabs, even if they do share the same religion," one of the sources pointed out. "In the Iran-Iraq war, (Ayatollah) Khomeini thought Shiite troops in the Iraqi army would not fight against fellow Shiites, but they did. Ultimately, what Iraqi Shiites want to do is run the show, not hand it to the Iranians."
On Thursday, unknown gunmen shot dead a diplomat from the Iranian embassy in Baghdad as he was riding in his car in the Iraqi capital. It was not known whether the killing was linked to Iranian mediation efforts, but the Iranians are learning to their cost that involvement has its price, no matter on whose side.
