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BAGHDAD, Iraq -The Iraqi government is becoming
increasingly estranged from its Arab neighbors even
as it grows closer to Iran, a trend that threatens
the region's longtime balance of power and may make
Iraq less influential in regional affairs.
In the nearly two and a half years since Saddam
Hussein was toppled, not a single Arab nation has
dispatched an ambassador to Baghdad, and most have
closed what embassies were here. The Arab League has
yet to make good on promises to open a Baghdad
office. Regional media, typically state-funded,
still portray Iraq as a land occupied by the U.S.
military and governed by American-installed lackeys.
Jordanian Prime Minister Adnan Badran last weekend
became the first Arab government chief to visit Iraq
since Saddam's fall. But the Iraqi government
recently has squabbled with just about every Middle
Eastern nation except Iran. It criticized Qatar for
sending aid to American hurricane victims but not to
Iraq, argued with Kuwait over their common border
and blamed Syria for fueling the Iraqi insurgency.
The friction between the Baghdad administration and
Arab governments has trickled down to ordinary
Iraqis, who frequently echo their leaders in
accusing Arabs from neighboring countries of suicide
bombings and attacks on infrastructure. On a call-in
show last month on al Iraqiya, the government-owned
TV station, several viewers demanded that all
non-Iraqi Arabs be expelled.
"I'd rather we joined the European Union than those
Arabs," one caller said.
Iraqi leaders, most of whom are Shiite Muslim Arabs
or Kurds, say the blame for the estrangement rests
squarely on the other countries, whose leadership
and population are dominated by Sunni Muslim Arabs.
The rest of the region's monarchs and authoritarians
have rebuffed their calls for partnership out of
fear that democratic change in Iraq will sow unrest
in their own volatile nations, the Iraqi officials
charge.
"We have warned our neighbors - our Arab brothers,
our Islamic brothers - that the new Iraq is going to
be a different one," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari,
a Kurd, said in an interview. "It's always been
taken by those who oppose change in Iraq that Iraq
has been hijacked - by the Americans, by the
Israelis, by the Kurds, by the Shiites - to strip it
from its Arab womb. ... If you care so much, why
don't you have embassies? Why don't you send
ambassadors?"
Many non-Iraqi Arabs praise the country's progress
toward democracy and say it may influence the pace
of change in other Arab nations. But Iraq isn't
likely to wield clout with Arab governments, they
add.
"It will not fit like before," said Issam Adawi, an
Egyptian who's the Iraq director for the Americas
Development Foundation, a private corporation that
promotes democracy with grants from the U.S. Agency
for International Development. "It won't be the
country people relied on to advocate Arabism. Iraq
is moving toward being a piece of Iran, especially
in the south."
At a recent news conference, Iraqi Prime Minister
Ibrahim al Jaafari, a Shiite who'd spent years of
exile in Iran, blasted Arab leaders for failing to
send condolences after a suicide bomber killed
dozens of Iraqi children. Without missing a beat, he
then lavished praise on Iran for pledging $1 billion
to build hospitals, schools and libraries in Iraq.
The juxtaposition drew hand-wringing from Iraqi
Sunni politicians.
The most contentious issue of late was wording
related to Iraq's Arab identity in a draft of the
country's new constitution. Sunni Arabs on the
drafting committee insisted on enshrining Iraq as a
founder of the Arab League and a part of the Arab
world. Kurds, who speak a different language from
Arabs, balked at that, and the latest draft reads,
"its Arab people are part of the Arab nation."
The Arab League sharply criticized the document,
while the foreign ministers of several oil-rich
Persian Gulf Arab states issued a joint statement
calling for the preservation of Iraq's "Arab and
Islamic identity."
Iraqi politicians say the uproar over the country's
identity simply cloaks a collective mourning for the
loss of Sunni rule in what was once the touchstone
of the Arab world.
"Everybody is waiting. They haven't made up their
minds whether this Iraqi project will succeed or
not," Zebari said. "Everybody is apprehensive and
some of them, to be honest, want it to fail so they
can keep away from this pressure to reform."
Several top Iraqi politicians said their government
was at least partially to blame for its isolation,
and that it had spent more time nurturing ties to
the ruling clerics of Shiite Iran than reaching out
to Arab nations.
Ayad Allawi, the secular Shiite politician who
served as Iraq's caretaker prime minister until his
loss in January's elections, said that on a trip to
Egypt over the summer he'd struck a deal with the
Arab League to open a Baghdad office and had
persuaded the influential Islamic scholars at Azhar
University to issue a religious edict denouncing
terrorist attacks in Iraq.
But just as he celebrated those successes, Allawi
said, militants kidnapped the top Egyptian envoy in
Baghdad, something that al Jaafari's government made
worse by suggesting that the diplomat, who was
executed, had sealed his fate by trying to open
talks with insurgents.
"This caused a severe setback," Allawi said.
As relations with other Arab nations come apart at
the seams, the Iraqi government relies more
frequently on Iran, which has begun providing
electricity for its power-starved neighbor. Zebari
described Iranian leaders as shrewd politicians who
curtailed their meddling into Iraq's affairs when
confronted with evidence of smuggling, insurgent
infiltration and drug trafficking along their shared
border. He said Arab nations, especially Syria,
weren't as willing to address similar concerns.
Zebari said the friction between Iraq and its
neighbors would ease only when Arab leaders were
ready to deal with a multiethnic, religiously
diverse administration in Baghdad.
"Make no mistake. We are here to stay," Zebari said,
recalling remarks he made to members of the Arab
League. "We are not temporary or interim leaders.
After Saddam's topple, you have to live with these
faces, whether you like them or you dislike them."
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