Iran and Iraq try to bridge the gap

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By Jim Muir BBC News

President Ahmadinejad came to power in June 2005

The president of Iran has just made an unprecedented official visit to Iraq and, as these things go, it was pretty bizarre.

For the United States, Iran is still very much part of the "Axis of Evil".

And nobody personifies that more than the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who wants Israel to disappear off the map and who is uncompromising on Iran's right to develop nuclear power.

And for his Iran, the United States is still very much the "Great Satan", the seat of "global arrogance".

And nowhere has that "arrogance" found greater expression than on Iran's doorstep - in Iraq - where the Americans currently have about 160,000 troops.

Yet here was the Iranian president flying into Baghdad, through skies controlled by American air power, to carry out the very first state visit by any leader since the Americans and their allies invaded five years ago.

He is not quite the only president to have been here, though. George Bush has been several times.

It must all have been pretty galling for the Americans, as their arch-enemy swanned in and canoodled with their proteges right under their noses But what a contrast this was with those furtive visits, which were never announced in advance and sticking to heavily guarded US military bases.

Mr Ahmadinejad got the full red-carpet reception and send-off, with guards of honour, national anthems and all the trappings.

Busy schedule

And in between, he seemed to be all over the place, meeting government leaders, members of parliament, diplomats and intellectuals, and even going to pray in one of the Shia shrines here in the middle of the night.

The presidents of Iraq and Iran review the honour guard in Baghdad

And of course there were numerous press conferences, with a relaxed and grinning Mr Ahmadinejad putting across his basic message: Iran and Iraq are neighbours, they belong together and America is the odd man out.

The Americans, of course, were holding the ring for a visit they could easily have vetoed.

They left the Iranian visitor's immediate security and movements to the Iraqis and kept their own forces out of the way. All went well.

But it must all have been pretty galling for them, as their arch-enemy swanned in and canoodled with their proteges right under their noses.

Overthrow of Saddam

And the irony is of course that it was the Americans themselves who made it all possible in the first place.

By toppling Saddam Hussein five years ago, they achieved something the Iranians had tried hard to do for more than two decades and failed.

By toppling the Iraqi leader five years ago, the Americans did a huge favour, not just to the Iraqi opposition - now in power - but also to Tehran

Ayatollah Khomeini never forgave Saddam Hussein for invading Iran in 1980.

Through the eight years of blood-sapping war that ensued, his aim was to overthrow Saddam.

He only accepted a ceasefire in 1988 because the two countries had battered one another to their knees, and he said it was like drinking a poison chalice.

But that goal remained and Iran threw its weight behind the full range of Iraqi opposition groups, which were ultimately unable to break Saddam Hussein's grip.

So by toppling the Iraqi leader five years ago, the Americans did a huge favour, not just to the Iraqi opposition - now in power - but also to Tehran.

Natural allies

It benefited doubly because its natural allies in Iraq, the Shia, were lifted to political predominance in the new Iraq, making up, as they do, some 60% of the population.

None of Washington's Arab allies - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and so on - have made state visits to Iraq, nor do they even have active embassies here because their natural allies, Saddam Hussein's Sunni community, have been the losers.

So have the Americans basically delivered Iraq to Iran?

That is a suggestion they bridle at, and, of course, it is not that simple.

The Ahmadinejad visit was seen as crowning a process of reconciliation after the war in the 1980s. But the war legacy is a deep one.

I am thinking of people like Nader, my driver for nearly five years in Tehran, who lost a leg at the battlefront early in the war; of others still dying in Iranian hospitals as their lungs are slowly corroded by Saddam's mustard gas; and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia people who died defending their homeland against their fellow Shia from the Islamic Republic.

While Iranian influence is strong and always will be, it is hard to imagine Iraq as an Iranian province.

Iraq's confused identity

The current Iraqi government, dominated by Shia, is negotiating a long-term strategic agreement with the Americans, as an insurance against domestic and foreign threats while it rebuilds its own forces.

It is desperately hoping Tehran will not see that as a threat or a challenge and that the warm welcome accorded to Mr Ahmadinejad will help convey reassurance.

But in the end, it all underlines the fact that Iraq's identity and orientations are still confused.

It is not really part of the Western-backed alliance of Sunni Arab states nor is it fully aligned with Shia Iran.

It probably never can be one or the other, now that the lid is off. And in a region like this, that is not going to make life easy.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 8 March, 2008 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm">programme schedules </a> for World Service transmission times.