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Iran, Iraq Herald 'New Chapter' in Shiite-Led Alliance
Iraqi Premier Ibrahim Jafari, left, with Iran's Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref, is the first Iraqi leader to visit Iran in over a decade.
(By Vahid Salemi -- Associated Press)
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During a visit to Iraq on Tuesday, Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick said he reminded Jafari and other Iraqi officials "that they live in a tough neighborhood." Regarding better relations with Iran, Zoellick said, "some aspects may be constructive, but be aware of what the other side wants."
U.S. officials and regional analysts said they believed Iran shared the immediate U.S. goal of stabilizing Iraq and preserving its territorial integrity. Like Iraq, Iran has its own ethnic Kurdish and Sunni Muslim religious minorities, in addition to an Arab ethnic minority, and also fears a spillover of tensions across the border, they said.
Iraqi Defense Minister Sadoun Dulaimi, after returning from a visit to Tehran this month in which a framework for military cooperation was hammered out, made the same argument. "We are all working in harmony with the aim of building a secure and stable Iraq," he said. "We want to open the door of peace and love to neighboring countries."
The issue is Iran's long-term goals, Bush administration officials said. U.S. policy-makers, who have sought to steer Iraq toward a secular democracy, are stridently opposed to any interaction between Iran and Iraq that would encourage Iraqis to emulate the system of governance that their neighbor adopted in 1979, when it became a theocracy.
"Is it their intention by supporting certain Iraqi political parties to have 'friendlies' in power, or is it to go beyond that, to have a commonality of governments?" said a senior State Department official involved in making policy toward Iraq.
But regional experts and many U.S. and Iraqi officials point out the stark differences between the two countries that suggest an Iranian theocracy might not be suited to Iraq. Iran is populated predominantly by Shiites who are Persian, an Indo-European ethnic group, while Iraq is predominantly Arab and its Shiite majority has long been repressed. Iraq's most powerful cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, an Iranian-born Shiite, has rejected the active political role for clerics integral to the system Khomeini built in Iran.
"Good relations with regard to all neighbors means not to seek to dominate particular Iraqi institutions or Iraqi areas," Khalilzad, the new ambassador, told reporters in Washington. The key, he added, is for Iraq's neighbors "not to take advantage of difficulties inherent in any transition."
Wright reported from Washington.
