BAGHDAD BLUES: Is Iran the True Victor of the Iraq War?

[maddezmom]

By Volkhard Windfuhr and Bernhard Zand

Iran has benefited from the downfall of the Saddam regime like no other country. Now Iran's mullahs are pressing for more influence -- and are apparently using terror as a means to that end. The Shiite-dominated south is already said to be completely under Tehran's control.

The Iranian embassy on the west bank of the Tigris river is a modest, almost shabby structure compared with the American diplomatic fortress in Saddam Hussein's former presidential palace. But while Washington's envoys have come and gone in Iraq, Tehran's diplomats and intelligence agents have been going about their work quietly and efficiently in the villa housing their embassy, shaded by overgrown plane trees, for decades. Even when Baghdad and Tehran were firing rockets at one another in the 1980s and hundreds of thousands were killed on the front, Iran maintained its outpost on the Tigris.

Nowadays, the embassy is literally bursting at the seams. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 and the rise of a Shiite-dominated government last May has transformed Iran's former arch-enemy into the kind of neighbor the Iranian theocracy can welcome with open arms. And with each passing day, Iran gains even more influence in Iraq. Americans and Britons see this influence as acutely dangerous -- and Iraqi Sunnis and the country's Arab neighbors are deeply concerned.

According to the most recent allegations, the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose nuclear program is already keeping the rest of the world on its toes, has long since stopped limiting itself to building economic ties and facilitating pilgrimages to Shiite shrines in Najaf and Kerbela.

more: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,370990,00.html

[rodeodance]

1. I think many noted this a long time ago (Iran benefits).