BAGHDAD - The press conference
room inside Baghdad's Green Zone is an improvised
tangle of television wires snaking along the floor
of the trailer. At the far end of the room, nine
US senators led by Vietnam War veteran and
presidential hopeful John McCain stand in front of
the made-for-TV background featuring American and
Iraqi flags abutting a State Department logo.
"We
have conveyed to them [Iraqi politicians] a sense
of urgency," McCain announces. McCain is alluding
to the underlying concerns bedeviling negotiations
between the American occupying authority and
Iraq's politicians to form a government, that a
stable national unity government must be put in
place if the country is not to fall further
apart.
The US's position has been
complicated by the killing of at least 40
worshipers in a Shi'ite community hall near a
mosque in Sadr City, a large Shi'ite ghetto in
Baghdad and support base for powerful Shi'ite
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army. The US
has repeatedly urged the government to disband
militias linked to political parties. The victims
are believed to have been killed in an operation
involving combined US and Iraqi forces.
The
United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the Shi'ite bloc with
the largest number of seats in parliament,
promptly called for the US occupation to turn over
control of all security operations to the Iraqi
government. Some UIA politicians also indicated
that they now wanted to pull out of the protracted
talks to form a government that have dragged on
since elections in January.
Increasingly,
it is dawning on Washington that the US must leave
Iraq sooner rather than later. "I think they want
us out, but not now," McCain says. "And we want
out."
And to do this, the US has had to
turn to Iran, with which it has had no diplomatic
relations since 1979, which it accuses of
developing a nuclear weapons program and which it
consistently accuses of meddling in Iraqi
affairs.
Stepping out of the press
conference in Baghdad, one of the senators told
Asia Times Online that talks with Iran "have been
ongoing for some time and I feel that they've
reached some tentative agreement". This confirms
an earlier comment by a European diplomat in
Tehran who told Asia Times Online that the "talks
have been going on for some time through the
Iranian and US embassies in Kabul".
The US
Embassy in Baghdad, however, denies that the talks
have begun.
Iranian Foreign Ministry
spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi was quoted on Monday by
the official IRNA news agency as saying that Iran
would talk with the US to pave the way for the
withdrawal of US forces from the
country.
"Although Tehran does not trust
Washington, it is seriously concerned about the
repercussions of wrong US policies in Iraq, which
is the main reason it has accepted Iraqi
officials' request that it hold negotiations with
the US," Asefi said.
US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice has confirmed that the US will
talk to Iran about Washington's accusations of
Iranian destabilization of Iraq.
The
political deadlock and rising violence that
prompted the Bush administration to open talks
with Tehran have also deepened the rift between
Shi'ite prime minister-elect Ibrahim al-Jaafari
and Iraqi President Jalal
Talabani.
Talabani, a Kurd, was angered by
a trip by Jaafari to Ankara to meet arch-rival
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Turkey's diplomats have increasingly sought to
build an alliance with Iraq's Shi'ite community as
they have seen traditional allies such as the
Turkmens failing to project their power at the
ballot box.
"I hope the US and Iran will
start their meetings and talks as soon as possible
and the knot in relations between the two
countries would be untied through the
negotiations," Jaafari was reported by IRNA as
saying.
But on Sunday, Talabani demanded
that no negotiations take place over his head,
according to American officials in Baghdad. His
objection centered on the absence of an Iraqi
government. Talabani's Kurdish constituency has
increasingly accused Tehran of hiding behind
attempts to destabilize the north, such as the
recent riots in a small town called Halabjah that
was the target of a gas-attack by former Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein.
These allegations
mirror similar charges made by Iranian officials
in the aftermath of the rumbling ethnic violence
that has plagued Iran's western Kurdistan and
Khuzestan regions, along the long border with
Iraq.
Despite being Iranian citizens, the
Arab and Kurdish inhabitants of these provinces
have been accused by Tehran of receiving aid from
the British Army occupying southern Iraq. Halabjah
could be an example of Iran demonstrating that it
can hit back, not only in Shi'ite southern Iraq,
but also in the till now peaceful north. On
Monday, more than 40 people were killed by a bomb
explosion set of by a suicide attacker inside a
joint US-Iraqi military base in the northern city
of Mosul.
An emerging alliance between
Iraq's Kurdish political elite and Sunni
politicians has not gone unnoticed in Tehran,
which - other than supporting Iraq's majority
Shi'ite community - has also cultivated both sides
of the Kurdish leadership.
The Kurdish
"defection" and Iran's search for new strategic
partners may have been part of the reason why
Tehran is now talking with US Ambassador to
Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad. These follow
negotiations conducted between Tehran and
Washington in the run-up and aftermath of the 2001
overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan
that were kept secret at the
time.
"Informally they are cooperating with
each other," an Iranian academic told Asia Times
Online. "It's better for Iran to see a balanced
government than a Shi'ite state which could cause
instability in the region. Even Iran is happy to
see some important Sunnis taking key posts. It's
not good that we put all our eggs into one
basket."
While Tehran publicly complains
about the US presence in Iraq, the Bush
administration-led war against Saddam toppled
Iran's bitterest adversary, against which it
fought a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s that
claimed the lives of an estimated million soldiers
on both sides.
Historically, Iran has never
managed to expand its influence in the region
without the support of foreign powers. The Shah's
closest ally was the US. Before that, the Safavid
ruler Shah Abbas allowed the British Empire into
his sphere of influence so they could expel the
Portuguese from the strategic Iranian port of
Bandar Abbas. As current allies Russia and China
become decreasingly supportive of Tehran, it
appears to be turning towards
Washington.
Speaking to the Asia Times
Online last year, a former deputy foreign minister
said that it is "neither in Iran's interest to
have a stable Iraq, nor do we want a fragmented
Iraq. Ambiguity is the cornerstone of the policy."
Iason Athanasiadis is an
Iran-based correspondent.
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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