TEHRAN: It came as no surprise that President George W. Bush has abandoned hope of working with Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist government. After all, he had famously and controversially labelled Iran as part of the “axis of evil” in his State of the Union speech; and Khatami, who was elected in 1997 and re-elected last year, has yet to trounce his conservative adversaries.

But Khatami’s angry response revealed the possibility that, with its bellicose and intolerant words, the Bush administration may well achieve what 20 years of diplomacy has failed to bring about: an alliance between the beleaguered Tehran and Baghdad.

Such an alliance would portend further instability in a region that contains two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves — and frustrate the United States’ aim to be the unchallenged foreign power in the region.

“We wish to caution the great powers against further interference in the affairs of this region and against the exacerbation of the flames of war,” warned Khatami last week, newly incensed by Bush’s apparent advocacy of the overthrow of the regime to which he belongs and, as I discovered on a recent visit there, reflecting sentiments that are prevalent in Iran.

Khatami’s warning came at the end of a fortnight of invective between Tehran and Washington, triggered by Bush’s statement earlier this month in which he criticized the country’s “uncompromising, destructive polices.”

Bush went on to further anger Khatami by praising the students’ demonstrations in Tehran, demanding that the government listen to the “Iranian people who have no better friend than the US.”

Such statements are counter-productive. By making Iranian reformists appear as stooges of Washington, thus undermining their nationalist credentials, they end up harming those the Bush administration is trying to bolster and aiding instead their adversaries, the conservatives. The upshot is that leaders of the reformist and conservative camps vie with one another in denouncing the United States for poking its nose into Iran’s domestic politics.

These latest verbal salvos resound against a backdrop of growing distrust between the two countries over Afghanistan. Iran had been infuriated by Bush’s allegation that its government had provided refuge to Al Qaeda fugitives — an accusation denied stoutly by Tehran.

On the American side, under the pretext of making the war- ravaged Afghanistan secure, the Pentagon rushed to set up “an observation post” at the Qala-e Qalat fort near the Afghan- Iranian border.

Compounding the Iranian leaders’ anxiety about the American entrenchment to the east is Bush’s plan to overthrow the regime of President Saddam Hussein in Iraq, with which Iran shares its 750-mile Western border. Having fought a bloody war with Iraq in 1980-88, the Iranians have no illusions about the nature of the Iraqi president or his authoritarian regime. But, 14 years after the end of that conflict, they would rather deal with the Saddam they have known than a henchman installed by Washington as his successor.

What, the Iranians wonder, if the Americans succeed in overthrowing Saddam without attacking his country? “That will still be bad for Iran,” Soltanifar argues. And the idea prompts talk of forging an alliance with Iraq for the sake of self- preservation.

As it is, the Iranians and Iraqis are on the verge of resolving the long-running dispute over the exchange of prisoners of war.

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi was the first minister to visit Baghdad since 1980 when he boarded the maiden Iran Air flight from Tehran in October 2000 to meet the Iraqi leader.

The stands of Iran and Iraq on the Palestinian issue are in line with that of Syria. Being on Washington’s list of countries that allegedly sponsor international terrorism, Syria could be another Bush administration candidate for regime change someday — after Iraq and Iran. Syrian President Bashar Assad cannot be unaware of that.

This therefore raises the possibility of an Iranian-Iraqi- Syrian alliance, stretching from the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean — an alarming prospect for the Bush White House but the one that flows logically from its campaign for regime change in Iran.

The administration’s current policy risks driving its declared enemies into each other’s arms, where they will pose a more potent challenge to the United States.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.