Iran's Nervous Neighbors

AP Photos Iran casts a long shadow over the Mideast—arming Hezbollah, backing outlawed Iraqi militias, supporting the Taliban. So how does the region feel about the uprising? Salameh Nematt checks in.

The crisis in Iran will have significant implications for the country’s projection of power in the region and its ability to continue to stir up trouble throughout the world—even if the regime temporarily succeeds in brutally crushing the unprecedented uprising by the reformist movement.

For several years, Iran has cast a long shadow over the entire Middle East and the Gulf region. Whether through its military and financial support for the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon or the Hamas movement in the Palestinian territories—both of which are on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations—or its support for outlawed Shiite militias in Iraq and the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, the Iranian regime has had a hand in almost every trouble spot in the region.

In Iraq, pro-Iran parties “lost a lot of their clout in the last provincial elections [in January] and may have decided to rig the elections in Iran after a double electoral loss in Iraq and Lebanon.”

Iran also has been accused of hosting senior members of al Qaeda in Iraq, backing extremist groups in Somalia, and even funding Hezbollah sleeper cells in the U.S.

Nowhere in the Middle East is the impact of the Iran crisis more visible than in Lebanon, a country that has suffered most because of Iran’s meddling in its internal affairs. In July 2006, Hezbollah, acting against the legitimately elected government of Lebanon, provoked a war with Israel that resulted in the Israelis destroying nearly one-third of Lebanon’s infrastructure and causing the deaths of more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and dozens of Israelis and Israeli Arabs across the border in Israel.

When the protesters in Iran hit the streets charging election fraud, pro-democracy Lebanese were jubilant at the prospect of the regime falling in a counter-revolution that would not only free the Iranians, but also the Lebanese who had been in the grip of a rogue militia backed by Iran that is more powerful than their government and better armed than their own armed forces.

Writing in the Lebanese daily An-Nahar Wednesday, Ali Hamadeh, a supporter of the government and a harsh critic of Hezbollah, said the militia’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was the first to congratulate Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who was reinstalled in rigged elections. But, Hamadeh pointed out, “We did not hear a single word from him in sympathy with the reformists whose blood has been shed on the streets of Tehran.”

Referring to the June 7 Lebanese parliamentary elections, in which the pro-Western parties dealt a painful defeat to Hezbollah and its allies, he said the Lebanese independence movement “stood up to this armed fascist religious tyranny, and it will continue to stand against it today and tomorrow.”

In Iraq, Iran has been widening its influence since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 by arming and funding such pro-Iran militias as the Mahdi Army, led by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.