A Good Article
By Gareth Porter
".....The pivotal development in the new Iranian position in the region has been the emergence of Iraq's Shi'a-dominated regime.
Hamid Reza Dehghani, director of the Center for Persian Gulf and Middle East Studies at the foreign ministry's think-tank, left no doubt in an interview that the transformation of Iraq from mortal enemy of the Islamic Republic of Iran to a friendly state represents an epochal shift in Iran's security position in the region....
He cites the close connections between the Iranian and Iraqi Shia spiritual communities: the top Shia cleric in Iraq, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, is an Iranian; Iraqi Shia scholars study in Iran's main spiritual center, Qom; and hundreds of thousands of Iranians have made pilgrimages to the Iraqi holy cities of Najaf and Karbala since 2003......
A paper on the "Shia Factor" in Iran's regional policy, published last month by the Center for Strategic Research, a think-tank that serves Iran's Expediency Council, acknowledges that Iran is now cultivating Shia allies, especially in Iraq and Lebanon, in pursuit of its national security objectives in the region. The author, Dr. Kayhan Barzegar, an international relations specialist at Islamic Azad University in Tehran, argues that Iran's close relations with the Shia in the region are aimed at "building a strategic linkage for establishing security."
The main strategic advantages of Iran's relationships with Shia movements, Barzegar writes, is the "installation of a new generation of friendly elites at the level of states, who have no backgrounds or feeling of enmity toward Iran." The Shia government in Iraq, according to the author, was the "turning point" in putting the "Shia factor" at the center of Iran's foreign policy.
But Iran's Shia diplomacy in the region also extends to Shia movements that either hold quasi-state power, like the Hezbollah in Lebanon, or that have remained shut out of political power completely, as is the case in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia......"
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