U.S., Iran icy as Iraqi premier pleads for neighbors’ support

KUWAIT CITY – The United States and Iran, the two nations with the most at stake in Iraq, pointedly ignored each other Tuesday as Iraq’s premier unsuccessfully pleaded for financial and diplomatic backing from rich Arab neighbors still leery of Tehran’s influence on Baghdad.

A sharp exchange between Saudi and Iranian diplomats underscored the mistrust that has hampered Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s mission to win those commitments.

Rice and Iranian Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki said only a brief hello and did not shake hands as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he cannot understand why Arab states have not forgiven Iraq’s crushing debts, made new loans or sent ambassadors to Baghdad.

“We find it difficult to explain why diplomatic exchange (between Iraq and its Middle Eastern neighbors) has not taken place,” al-Maliki told foreign ministers from nearby nations.

“Many foreign countries have kept their diplomatic missions in Baghdad and did not make security excuses.”

Rice sat diagonally across a large U-shaped table from Mottaki as al-Maliki spoke at the opening of a meeting of Iraq’s neighbors held in Kuwait – the third such meeting in the past year.

A copy of the conference’s draft resolution calls for increased help from Iraq’s neighbors in fighting militias and “assistance in solving the issue of Iraqi debts.” But Iraq’s neighbors have made similar pledges at two previous meetings, with little follow-through. They also have promised to open diplomatic missions in Baghdad, but none has done so.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and Rice said they heard encouraging signals on both the diplomatic and economic fronts, but Arab states offered no specific new promises. “We need to be patient. This is how politics works in this part of the world,” Zebari said.

Tuesday’s conference was a rare occasion in which top diplomats from Iran and the United States were in the same room. Rice told reporters she greeted Syria’s envoy to the session.

The Bush administration blames Iran and Syria for feeding the insurgency inside Iraq, but considers Iran the greater problem.

“We would hope that all of Iraq’s neighbors would choose to be positive neighbors. I don’t think it’s any secret that we do not believe that to be the case with all of Iraq’s neighbors,” Rice said. “The good thing about meetings like this is that it periodically calls people to account.”

Rice congratulated the group for agreeing to hold its next session in Baghdad. Iraq wanted to host such a meeting last year, but Arab diplomats resisted, citing safety concerns. Overall violence has declined, especially in Baghdad, in the past year.

The U.S. was midwife to Iraq’s Shiite-led democratic government, and Washington remains al-Maliki’s greatest patron. He is trying to balance that relationship with the complex one he and his government maintain with Iran, Washington’s principal adversary in the Middle East.

The Sunni Arab neighbors al-Maliki is courting, meanwhile, have a strong stake in keeping Iraq – which is majority Shiite – firmly in the Arab orbit as a buffer against expanding influence by Iran, the world’s largest Shiite nation.

But they are still leery of al-Maliki’s government and the deep Iranian ties of its main coalition members.