By: Sana Abdallah – Middle East Times

AMMAN — Thirty years after the success of its Islamic revolution, the Iranian influence in the region may not have grown as much as the ruling clerics would have wished, but its clout has expanded enough to become a sharp thorn in the side of the Western-allied Arab countries.

PERSIAN PRIDE — Iranians are proud of the success of their Islamic revolution 30 years later. Though Iran’s ambition to expand its clout across the region is not as successful, its influence still remains a thorn in the side of Western-allied Arab countries. Thousands of Iranians celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution at Azadi (freedom) Square in Tehran on Feb. 10. (UPI Photo)

When Iran’s Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was ousted from power in January 1979 and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France in February of the same year to be installed as the leader and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Arab countries quickly sensed the potential threat emanating from the new militantly anti-American regime in Tehran.

The immediate success of the Islamic revolution, although Shiite Islam, meant it would not be long before Iran is able to ward off Western influence and export political Islam to the region, where religious politics was already brewing in the streets of the predominantly Sunni Muslim Arab world.

When Khomeini called for Iraq’s Shiite majority to rise up against Saddam Hussein’s secular Baath regime in September 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, sparking an eight-year war that killed one million people on both sides.

Throughout the bloody war, Saddam repeatedly insisted he was fighting on behalf of all Arab states against Persian expansion, and most of the Arabs in fact supported Iraq at the time. In addition to Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain also saw that the new regime in Tehran was inciting their Shiite minorities to rise against their regimes.

While Iran’s relations with the Arabs have fluctuated since the end of the war with Iraq in 1988, though they sustained caution, Tehran’s policies of intervention in the Arab world and its pursuit of nuclear and missile programs – intensified under the current leadership of conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – have raised serious Arab concerns over regional security, as they scrambled for ways to deal with a new rising regional, and non-Arab, power.

Middle East experts say that Iranian ambitions to export their revolution have not succeeded as much as they would have liked, namely because of the Persian, Shiite-style system of Iran’s “theocratic democracy.”

The 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam’s regime in Iraq, and subsequent occupation, brought to power pro-Iranian rulers in the new Iraq and sectarian strife began to rip the country apart, raising the tension further between the Arabs and Tehran.

Some Arab leaders began to raise the alarm about Iranian influence spreading across the region. In 2004, Jordan’s King Abdullah II warned of a “Shiite crescent” spreading from Iran to the Mediterranean.

In 2005, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal criticized U.S. policy in Iraq for serving Iranian interests. He said: “We fought a war together to keep Iran out of Iraq after Iraq was driven out of Kuwait (in 1991). Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason.”

A year later, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said the Arab Shiites were more loyal to Iran than to their own countries.

Iran’s influence in post-Saddam Iraqi politics, however, seems to shrinking. Last week’s provincial elections showed the Iranian-backed Shiite religious alliance losing ground to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s candidates, who recently distanced themselves from Tehran’s agenda, and other nationalist and secular groups.

There is also Iran’s declared support for and political empowerment of the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah organization and the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement, which have created serious polarization in the region between pro- and anti-Western camps. This polarization has played itself out, sometimes violently, in major political crises that have hit Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and split the Arab leaderships.

Foreign ministers of eight Arab nations and the Palestinian Authority last week met urgently in Abu Dhabi to “boost Arab solidarity by ending non-Arab intervention that is unwelcome and unconstructive,” in obvious reference to Iran.

Some analysts argue that the cost of Iran’s desire to be recognized as a powerful regional power to be reckoned with – whether through its influence on Iraq, Hezbollah and Hamas, or through its nuclear and missile programs – has been too costly and at the expense of its economy and its relations with the West.

Despite growing, yet shy, criticism by some Iranian reformists about the cost of the Islamic republic’s ambitions to become a regional power, Ahmadinejad feeds the national pride with the military and scientific development the country has achieved.

At a speech to thousands of people marking the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution on Tuesday, Ahmadinejad boasted about the “scientific achievements, and declared: “I officially announce that Iran today is a real and true superpower.”

This adds to the general historic Arab caution towards Iran.

It is no secret that Arab-Persian mistrust dates back since the Arab Muslim conquest of Mesopotamia in the 7th century, which eventually led to the end of the Persian Empire. Today, the two sides continue to disagree on whether the Gulf is “Arab” or “Persian.”

Analysts say the Arabs often sense that the Iranians look down on them as inferiors as they seek to impose their power in the region. However, even if Arab Islamist or nationalist groups meet with the Iranians on many political issues and have forged convenient alliance, this underlying demeanor may be one of the important factors preventing Tehran from achieving its ambitions in exporting its revolution to the rest of the region.