27.06.2004, 20:47
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Zitat:US Wars in Persian Gulf Unshackle Iran:evil::baeh:
TEHRAN, Iran - President Bush freed Afghanistan from the Taliban and toppled Saddam Hussein in Iraq, but in doing so he also may have unshackled an even more dangerous foe: Iran.
Western diplomats and local officials in the Middle East say Iran, widely considered a supporter of international terrorism that's trying to develop nuclear weapons, is emerging as the unintended winner of Bush's war on terrorism.
Iran's rise as a key power broker in the Persian Gulf is an alarming prospect for the United States, which has used political and economic sanctions to contain the Islamic Republic and its radical government for a quarter century, since Iranian radicals seized the American Embassy in Tehran.
"Iran has definitely come to be a major beneficiary" of U.S. policy since Sept. 11, 2001, said Mohammed Hadi Semati, a political scientist from Tehran University now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "With the exception of the current chaos, everything that comes out of the Iraqi operation is good for Iran's national interests."
The logic of Iran's ascendance is simple. Iran sat back as the United States launched expensive wars and defeated Iranian enemies on two of its borders, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran's population is predominantly Shiite Muslim, and with Iraq's Shiite majority certain to dominate any new Iraqi government, the two nations will share cultural and religious ties that will likely bringing the formerly warring neighbors closer.
Senior U.S. officials in Washington fear that a Shiite uprising in Iraq could trigger unrest in neighboring Kuwait, where Shiites are 30 percent of the population; in Bahrain, which is 70 percent Shiite, and in the oil-rich eastern province of Saudi Arabia, where Shiites are a narrow majority.
Iranians, who succeeded in exporting their Islamic revolution to Shiite parts of Lebanon after Israel invaded that country in 1982, believe they've now played their cards well as America stumbled into a guerrilla war in Iraq.
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