Iran 'now least of three evils'

The U.S. administration now distinguishes between Iran and the other countries that President George W. Bush lumped together last year in an "axis of evil" and does not plan to target the Islamic Republic after the increasingly likely war in Iraq, a senior official told the Los Angeles Times.

Despite growing concern about the regime's suspected nuclear weapons programme, Iran's assistance in the war on terrorism, and the gradual evolution of liberal thought there puts it in a different category from Iraq or North Korea, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said.

"The axis of evil was a valid comment, (but) I would note there's one dramatic difference between Iran and the other two axes of evil, and that would be its democracy. (And) you approach a democracy differently," Arm-itage said. "I wouldn't think they were next at all," he added.

Over the past 14 months, despite ongoing tensions and sometimes heated public rhetoric, U.S. and Iranian officials have held quiet discussions about a growing list of overlapping interests, U.S. officials confirmed.

The discussions, first on Afghanistan and now on Iraq, were often at international meetings, although informal contacts also have taken place, the sources said.

Iran shares a long border with Iraq, and it has also long hosted Iraqi opposition groups now also supported by the United States.

During four earlier administrations, Washington and Tehran have tried public and back-channel overtures that all failed to develop.

But the deepening U.S. involvement on all of Iran's borders - in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Central Asia, along the Gulf and now in Turkey and Iraq - has nudged the two countries into increasingly frequent discussions since the September 11 attacks, according to U.S. officials.

The discussions, they add, don't mark the onset of a formal dialogue or a major diplomatic thaw five years after Iranian President Mohammed Khatami proposed bringing down the "wall of mistrust" that has characterised relations since the 1979-81 hostage drama in which 52 Americans were held for 444 days.

In his State of the Union address this year, Bush said Tehran's religious regime "represses its people, pursues weapons of mass destruction and supports terror." Yet the contacts have been tentatively encouraging, the sources added.

The United States hopes Iran will play the same kind of role it did during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2001 rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Tehran promised to remain neutral in the conflict and to help conduct search-and-rescue operations if American pilots were shot down.

Iran is among the countries opposed to U.S. military intervention in Iraq, especially without a UN mandate, according to Iranian officials.

At celebrations this week to mark the 24th anniversary of Iran's 1979 revolution, Khatami said a U.S. attack on Iraq "is in line with its unilateral policy and illegitimate interference in the future of other countries."

Khatami acknowledged, however, that opposition to the war "does not mean that we are content with the Iraqi regime." Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, triggering a war that lasted eight years and inflicted hundreds of thousands of Iranian casualties, some from Iraq's use of chemical weapons.

Iran's main concerns, Iranian officials stress, have been with the postwar process and new Iraqi leadership. Khatami, whose domestic reform agenda and overtures to the outside world have been stalled by religious hard-liners, also warned Washington this week not to intervene in Iran.

"America has tested its luck once in confronting this nation by supporting the (former) shah's regime," he told tens of thousands at a Tehran rally. "I hope America would not test its luck once more."