Perspective: Iran aiding or abetting in Iraq?

Both Prime Minister Maliki and President Talabani of Iraq have made recent visits to visit Iranian President Ahmadinejad.

Baghdad's Residency Office, a bustling maze of corridors and smoky rooms, is a place of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Controlled by a Shia political party, it means foreigners who do not want to pay a bribe shuffle from desk to desk to get the signatures, stamps and counter signatures, and then more stamps, required to leave the country. Only one group is rushed through without a cursory glance: agents who breeze through with arms laden with stacks of passports. All of them from Iran.

Some are pilgrims to Shia holy sites whom you see streaming across the Shatt al-Arab waterway in the heavily laden ferries at festival time and plying the motorways in packed minibuses. Others are returning exiles, many of whose families hold only Iranian passports. Others are diplomats and businessmen.
But in the past few months, George W Bush, has signed a presidential order targeting another group that his administration alleges is in Iraq: Iranians - Revolutionary Guards and intelligence officers. Iran, the Shia state, is destabilising Iraqi politics and co-ordinating attacks on US forces by Shia insurgents, claim the Americans

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