WASHINGTON: As it courts military and diplomatic support among allies for a possible war against Iraq, the United States is also quietly reaching out to a longtime adversary — Iran — in hopes that it will stay on the sidelines in a new Persian Gulf conflict.

Since last summer, when they began laying the groundwork for a confrontation with Iraq, US officials have signalled a willingness to make contact with Tehran’s clerical regime to explain their goal of disarming Saddam Hussein and to seek Iran’s cooperation.

In an August speech, Bush adviser Zalmay Khalilzad said that despite US criticism of Iranian policy, the United States was open to discussions with Iran about Iraq. He added, “We seek an Iraq which is unified, stable, representative, protective of the rights of minorities, and no longer a threat to its neighbours. This should be in Iran’s interests as well.”

Addressing the United Nations on Sept 12, President Bush made a point of saying that Iran was threatened by Iraq’s failure to comply with UN mandates — Iraq had failed to account for missing Iranians, among other foreign nationals, he said; Iraq continued to harbour terrorists that direct violence against Iran; and in the past Saddam Hussein “has gassed many Iranians.”

The American overtures come at a sensitive time for the Iranian regime. Nervous about the United States’ long-term intentions in the Middle East, Iran’s clerical leadership is simultaneously cracking down on dissidents clamouring for a more open political system and facing economic problems, including a chronically high jobless rate.

The United States has pressed more than 50 allies for help in case of a war with Iraq, and this weekend two high-level envoys, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, begin a mission to seek cooperation from Turkey and other NATO allies.

American officials, who have limited goals in dealing with Iran, scoff at the idea of a drastic improvement in relations. Bush labelled Iran as part of an “axis of evil” in his State of the Union speech this year.

But they hope to reach an understanding that would keep Iran out of a US conflict with Iraq and cooperative during the period of reconstruction after an expected American victory.

Iran avoided involvement during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and showed a measure of cooperation last year during the most intense phase of the US-led war to remove the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Although the US broke diplomatic relations with Iran after militants there took over the US Embassy in Tehran and held American diplomats hostage more than 20 years ago, it has slowly reopened channels of communication, using them to talk about Iraq.

On the surface, Iran would seem eager to cooperate in destroying Saddam Hussein’s regime. Having seen its troops victimized by Iraqi chemical weapons, Iran has reason to want Iraq stripped of weapons of mass destruction.

But the Iranian regime is nervous about what it fears are Washington’s intentions to make Iran a future target of America’s ‘war on terrorism’.

“Encirclement is what they’re afraid of,” said Edward S. Walker, president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, who met in New York early this fall with Iran’s foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi.

With a new US-backed government in Afghanistan on its eastern border and NATO member Turkey to the west, Iran would find itself nearly surrounded by countries more or less allied with the United States if American troops were to occupy Iraq and help install a new, pro-Western government.

In a speech to the United Nations Security Council in October, Iran’s UN ambassador, Javad Zarif, said a US attack on Iraq “will inevitably fuel further resentment everywhere — not just in Iraq.”

In his meeting with Walker and other American Mideast specialists in the fall, Kharrazi was “very polite” but also “very firm that he didn’t see how Iran could work with this administration, given the position the president had stated publicly and threats from some quarters of the administration,” Walker said.

Iran has various ways of causing trouble for the United States, analysts say. It could encourage major attacks against Israel by Hezbollah — its client guerrilla organization based in Lebanon, provoking Israel into a counterattack that could trigger a wider war — or by its allies in the militant Palestinian Hamas movement. Iran could also want to use its allies among Iraq’s Shia to gain influence in a new Iraqi government.

During the Afghan campaign, US officials saw Iran playing a double game. While not undermining the US war effort, Iran failed for months to arrest and extradite Al Qaeda members crossing the Afghan border into Iran. After the war, Iran infiltrated forces linked with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards into parts of Afghanistan.

US officials have refused to divulge the substance of their quiet communication with Iranians or to say whether Iran has given a pledge of cooperation.—Dawn/Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service (c) The Baltimore Sun.