Jim Lobe

Despite the sweeping victory of staunchly anti-US conservatives in Iran’s elections last month, analysts here believe the tentative detente between the two countries that began late last year will continue at least through the November US elections.

Since January, a series of developments have suggested that neither country is seeking confrontation with the other, in major part because they are both pre-occupied with other, more pressing issues.

This notion gained particular force when the United States dispatched half a dozen planeloads of emergency aid after a devastating earthquake in Bam in late December, then followed that with an offer to send a high-level delegation to inspect the damage. While Washington was highly critical of last month’s elections and the disqualification by the conservative-dominated Guardian Council of hundreds of reformist candidates, it did not mount a major campaign to discredit them.

The latest indication of detente came about two weeks ago when the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in occupied Iraq approved plans for the construction of an oil pipeline across the Shatt al-Arab waterway to the Iranian port of Abadan, a project expected to be completed by the end of this year.

Washington went along with the recommendation by Iraq’s oil ministry as a way to increase Baghdad’s exports — hence its export earnings — which have been held up by bottlenecks at Basra and sabotage in the northern part of the country.

Several days later, US officials told

reporters here Washington does not plan to press the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to refer Iran’s nuclear programme to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions.

Both moves marked setbacks to hawks in the administration who last May succeeded in cutting off a quiet dialogue between the US State Department and Iran after intelligence agencies traced bombings against western residential compounds in Riyadh to telephone calls from officials of the al-Qaeda terrorist group inside Iranian territory.

Tehran’s ability to make things more difficult for the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan if it chose to do so — a notion that is conceded even by administration hard-liners — has also given the resurgent conservatives greater confidence vis-à-vis Washington, say analysts here.

This confidence was on display last month when former Iranian president and power broker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told a prominent Tehran newspaper that Washington is “stuck in the mud in Iraq, and they know that if Iran wanted to, it could make their problems even worse’’.

Rafsanjani suggested that dialogue might even now be possible. ‘’For me, talking is not a problem’’.

In a much-remarked article, ‘Going Soft on Iran’, this week in the neo-conservative ‘Weekly Standard’, Iran specialist Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) warned that any ‘’realist’’ strategy of engagement was doomed to failure and that “in the end, only democracy in Iran will finally solve the nuclear and terrorist problems’’. — IPS