BEIRUT (Reuters) – The weakness and wealth of Iraq, now shorn of all but 50,000 U.S. troops, tempt its anxious neighbors to vie for influence among Iraqi factions struggling to form a government nearly six months after an election.

Iraq’s fledgling army remains ill-equipped to defend the national borders, but for now Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Syria are pursuing their goals mostly by non-military means.

BEIRUT, Aug 29 (Reuters) – The weakness and wealth of Iraq, now shorn of all but 50,000 U.S. troops, tempt its anxious neighbours to vie for influence among Iraqi factions struggling to form a government nearly six months after an election.

Iraq’s fledgling army remains ill-equipped to defend the national borders, but for now Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Syria are pursuing their goals mostly by non-military means.

None can count on getting the upper hand.

The 2003 U.S.-led invasion empowered Shi’ite Islamist groups friendly to Iran, but intra-Shi’ite conflicts, assertive Shi’ite politicians and core Iraqi nationalism limit even Tehran’s sway.

Turkey, using its growing regional influence, diplomatic reach, economic power and new popularity in the Arab world to act as a soft-spoken counterweight to Iran, advocates bringing Sunnis and Kurds, as well as Shi’ites, into any new government in Baghdad.

Although the U.S. combat mission ends this week without an agreed Iraqi government in place to check spurts of violence, adjacent countries seem less inclined to revive the widespread bloodletting that threatened to consume Iraq a few years ago.

"In 2005, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia were all feeding the violence in Iraq; the United States was adrift without a strategy; and the Iraqi government and security forces were barely existent," said Eurasia Group analyst David Bender.

Today, he argued, those neighbours preferred stability in Iraq, Iraqi security forces had improved and the viability of the Iraqi state was not being threatened as it was in 2005.



STARTING FROM ZERO

Even patchy progress in state-building, almost from scratch after the United States removed Saddam Hussein, banned his Baath Party and disbanded the army, has helped cap outside meddling.

"The stronger the state in terms of capacity and legitimacy, the weaker the regional factors," said Beirut-based sociologist Faleh Abdul-Jabbar. "So we are in better shape than in 2004-8."

He said foreign powers had to reckon with Iraqi leaders who had gained strength from their grip on the government, the state and its resources. They could not just dictate orders.

Abdul-Jabbar cited Iran’s failure to persuade its closest Shi’ite allies to swing behind acting Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki after the indecisive March vote narrowly gave former premier Iyad Allawi the biggest single bloc in parliament.

"Moqtada al-Sadr and Ammar al-Hakim refused to endorse Maliki, and Maliki refused to join hands with them despite tremendous, unbelievable pressure from the Iranians," he said.

Secular Turkey, ruled by a moderate Sunni Islamist party , looks askance at any line-up that would allow Shi’ite factions to exclude disenchanted minority Sunnis from power — a scenario that dismays Saudi Arabia and many other Arab countries.

They see a share of power for Allawi, a secular Shi’ite who won many Sunni votes in the March election, as the best way to help reintegrate Sunnis into Iraqi politics to avoid any return to the Sunni insurgency that helped al Qaeda militants flourish.

The Americans, who were impressed when Maliki defied Iranian wishes and attacked Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia in 2008, also want an inclusive Baghdad government, perhaps one aligning Allawi’s bloc with that of Maliki and a Kurdish alliance.

Personal ambitions as much as political differences have hindered the emergence of any such coalition. Iraq’s neighbours also find it easier to block alliances than to forge them.



STRAINED ALLIANCES

Even regional allies such as Iran and Syria are at odds over Iraq — it goes against the Arab nationalist grain of the secular Baathists who rule Syria, a Sunni-majority country, to see pro-Iranian Shi’ite Islamists monopolise power in Baghdad.

Turkey, while pursuing its own interests in Iraq, has avoided antagonising Iran, a valued trading partner, and has sought ways to resolve Tehran’s nuclear dispute with the West.

The United States, having upset the regional chessboard by invading Iraq, will see its power wane as its troops withdraw.

"Iran has to a great degree already found its role in Iraq. The U.S. combat withdrawal will allow Iran to entrench that position," said Gala Riani of IHS Global Insight.

Yet political dominance eludes Iran, which has also met resistance from the Shi’ite religious schools in the holy city of Najaf, where Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a heavyweight cleric revered across the Shi’ite world, challenges the doctrines of clerical rule that underpin the Islamic Republic.

"Iraq is theologically more important to Shi’ite Islam than Iran," said Paul Rogers, a professor at Britain’s Bradford University, alluding to Iraq’s great Shi’ite shrine cities of Najaf and Kerbala. "This may tend to limit Iran’s religious influence."

For now, Iraq’s neighbours are jockeying for political influence rather than pursuing their goals by force.

That could change.

If Iraq’s post-election deadlock persists, the greater the risk of its security gains unravelling. Political, ethnic and sectarian groups might eventually abandon the bargaining process and return to violence to secure their perceived interests.

Any such breakdown, particularly if it led to a showdown between Arabs and Kurds in the north, could draw in Turkey, Iran or Syria, which each have their own restive Kurdish minorities.

Abdul-Jabbar said military intervention by Iraq’s neighbours could not be entirely discounted, even though it was an extreme scenario made less likely even by a reduced U.S. troop presence.

"But if this stalemate lingers on, if the Baathists decide to go violent again, if the army disintegrates, why not?" (Editing by Michael Christie)

BEIRUT, Aug 19 (Reuters) – The U.N.-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon, set up to try the killers of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, inspires scant faith among Lebanese.

Nearly 18 months after it began to function, the court has yet to file indictments for the huge bombing on Feb. 14, 2005 in which Hariri and 22 others died. It has no suspects in custody.

Instead of delivering truth, justice and an end to a culture of impunity prevailing since Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war, the tribunal — and the U.N. investigation that preceded it — has so far failed to dispel the doubts of its detractors. Even its supporters can barely conceal their disquiet.

Perceptions are rife here that the hybrid court, which has Lebanese as well as international judges, is somehow a pawn in murky tussles for influence involving Israel, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United States and others.

"This isn’t an isolated legal process. It’s a heavily political process," said Beirut-based commentator Rami Khouri.

The court denies being swayed by politics, saying it works in line with the highest international judicial standards. "Its proceedings are driven by these rules and the burden of proof, not by outside influence," said spokeswoman Fatima Issawi.

Obviously, the tribunal could best assert its credibility by producing compelling evidence to identify and convict Hariri’s assassins. It may yet do so, but few Lebanese would bet on a "smoking gun" emerging from a mishap-prone investigation which at first relied on witnesses who later recanted their testimony. Chances that the prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare, would soon file indictments dimmed this week when he received evidence from Hezbollah, via the Lebanese authorities, which the Iranian and Syrian-backed group says points to an Israeli hand in the crime.

Having requested that Hezbollah submit its material, Bellemare will now need time to review it — although few in Lebanon believe an international court would ever have been created had an Israeli track been suspected at the outset.



DISCREDITING THE TRIBUNAL

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, responding to reports that the tribunal planned to indict some of his men, has sought to discredit it by showing on television what he said was intercepted Israeli surveillance film of routes used by Hariri.

He also suggested that Lebanese arrested in recent months as spies for Israel, some of whom worked for telephone firms, could have manipulated cellphone evidence gathered by investigators.

Nasrallah, who leads Lebanon’s strongest armed force, calls the court an "Israeli project" against Hezbollah and its allies. The possibility that even "rogue" Hezbollah members might face charges seemed so explosive that Syrian and Saudi heads of state jointly visited Beirut in July to calm fears of sectarian tension between Nasrallah’s Shi’ite followers and Sunnis loyal to Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, the slain statesman’s son.

On Wednesday, Hariri welcomed Hezbollah’s submission of its data on the assassination and reaffirmed his own commitment to the tribunal as "the adequate body for achieving justice".

Lebanese views on whether that is indeed the case reflect the rifts between those who see the West as a malign handmaiden of Israel and those whose worst fears focus on Iran and Syria.

"Both sides have grounds not to have faith in the process," said Nadim Shehadi, of Britain’s Chatham House think-tank.

"Those who want it to succeed are losing hope because it’s so slow and bureaucratic and costly. Those who don’t want it to succeed have the conspiracy theories," he said, accusing the tribunal’s opponents of being the ones politicising it.

For Omar Nashabe, a journalist with al-Akhbar, a newspaper often sympathetic to Hezbollah, the reverse is true.

"What is cruel is when you pretend this mechanism is for justice, whereas in the back of your brain you are creating a mechanism that serves your political interests," he said, alluding to Western powers that drive the U.N. Security Council.



REVULSION AGAINST SYRIA

The tribunal, with a far narrower mandate than international bodies set up elsewhere to tackle war crimes or genocide, is the child of a moment when Hariri’s killing united much Lebanese, Western and Arab opinion against Syria, forcing it to loosen its 29-year military, security and political grip on Lebanon.

The early reports of U.N. investigators implicated Syria, which denied any involvement and has since largely emerged from diplomatic isolation to regain much of its influence in Lebanon.

Even Hariri, who used to accuse the Syrians of killing his father, has mended his fences with Damascus since becoming prime minister, saying it was up to the tribunal to produce the truth.

Soon after the tribunal began work in March 2009 it freed four pro-Syrian Lebanese generals held for four years without charge, saying it did not have enough evidence to indict them.

Bellemare has kept largely silent on what he plans next.

"We are at a crunch point now," said Michael Young, a Lebanese analyst who has often criticised the investigation for failing to pursue Syrian leads aggressively enough.

"If Bellemare doesn’t have enough to indict now, it’s very hard to see what magic bullet he will fire off that will enable him to make a formal indictment in the foreseeable future."

Instead, the prosecutor might ask Lebanon to make arrests, Young predicted — a request that Beirut’s unity government, which includes Hezbollah, would find hard to comply with.

"Nasrallah’s gamble is that politics will come to overwhelm the legal side of the investigation," said Young.

Critics of the tribunal, and even some of its supporters, lament the selective nature of its quest, essentially to bring to justice the killers of one politician in a land with a long, bloody history of assassinations, wars and Israeli invasions.

"It was part of a larger political decision to put pressure on Syria and Hezbollah, who are supposed to have been the bad guys in this story," argued Karim Makdisi, who teaches international relations at the American University of Beirut.

"In the Arab region there’s tremendous distrust for the ‘international community’ and what’s been done in Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq," he said.

"You cannot come and parachute something like the tribunal on top and say, well, this has a life of its own and people shouldn’t believe in conspiracy theories." (Editing by Jon Hemming)

MLEETA, Lebanon (Reuters) – If you have an urge to inspect mangled Israeli tanks, toy with a rocket launcher or explore a genuine rock-cut guerrilla bunker, Hezbollah’s multi-media theme park in south Lebanon is just the place.

The Shi’ite Muslim group, which fought Israel to a stalemate four years ago and has been preparing for the next war ever since, has applied a creative flair to its “resistance tourist landmark” at Mleeta that mirrors its innovative military skills.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Economic or ethnic discontent may lie behind an apparently amateurish attack on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s convoy on Wednesday — if such it was — rather than any plot by militants or foreign foes to kill him.

Ahmadinejad, one of Iran’s most divisive leaders since the 1979 Islamic revolution, is defying tougher sanctions over his country’s nuclear programme, but is under fire from reformist and conservative critics of his foreign and economic policies.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Economic or ethnic discontent may lie behind an apparently amateurish attack on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s convoy Wednesday — if such it was — rather than any plot by militants or foreign foes to kill him.

Ahmadinejad, one of Iran’s most divisive leaders since the 1979 Islamic revolution, is defying tougher sanctions over his country’s nuclear program, but is under fire from reformist and conservative critics of his foreign and economic policies.

BEIRUT, Aug 4 (Reuters) – Economic or ethnic discontent may lie behind an apparently amateurish attack on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s convoy on Wednesday — if such it was — rather than any plot by militants or foreign foes to kill him.

Ahmadinejad, one of Iran’s most divisive leaders since the 1979 Islamic revolution, is defying tougher sanctions over his country’s nuclear programme, but is under fire from reformist and conservative critics of his foreign and economic policies.

His disputed re-election in June 2009 provoked huge street protests that were crushed by security forces led by the elite Revolutionary Guards. Defeated candidates Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi always urged their supporters to avoid violence.

A source in the president’s office said Ahmadinejad survived unhurt when a home-made explosive device was thrown at his motorcade as it drove through the western city of Hamadan.

Some Iranian media denied there had been any attack at all, or sharply toned down their initial accounts of the blast.

The semi-official Fars news agency, after first reporting a man had hurled a home-made grenade, later said a firecracker had been set off by a man who was "excited" to see the president.

There was no official word on who was behind the bang and no claim of responsibility. Speculation about possible culprits ranged from foreign intelligence services to Iranian ethnic militants and other domestic opponents of Ahmadinejad.

Theodore Karasik, a security analyst at the Dubai-based INEGMA group, linked the incident to "growing discontent" with Ahmadinejad’s rule, even among some of his core constituents.

"This happened in a provincial area where he’s supposed to be more popular. If he gets people riled up there, then that’s not good," he said. "Now the conservatives are turning on him because of the economy and the position Iran is in because of the fourth wave of (United Nations) sanctions."

There have been no previous confirmed attempts on the president’s life. In December 2005, Iranian authorities denied reports that Ahmadinejad had been the target of assassins in the lawless southeastern region of Baluchistan.



SOLO ATTACK?

The Iranian leader may blame outside powers such as Israel and the United States, but the small scale of Wednesday’s blast suggests that even a disgruntled loner could have done it.

"It’s not well-organised. It’s an individual attempt, not a group," said Dubai-based security analyst Mustafa Alani, who pointed to ethnic Kurd or Baluch discontent as a possible cause.

He predicted that Ahmadinejad would seize on the affair as evidence that he is being targeted by foreign enemies. "They (the Iranians) will pin it on the Americans or Israelis."

Ahmadinejad declared this week that the Israelis had him in their sights. "The stupid Zionists have hired mercenaries to assassinate me," he told a conference in Tehran on Monday.

The populist Iranian leader has toured the provinces more than any of his predecessors, often offering cash, loans or local development projects to consolidate his support.

"We will have to see whether this is serious enough that he cuts back doing that," said Gala Riani, Middle East analyst at IHS Global Insight. "There have been occasions when people have thrown things at him or heckled him, but that has been it."

Iran, the world’s fifth biggest oil exporter, is feeling economic pain as the United States and the European Union add their own sanctions to milder U.N. measures adopted in June.

Tehran said last week it was ready to return to talks with Western powers on a nuclear fuel swap, shortly afer the EU had announced steps to block oil and gas investment.

Although Ahmadinejad faces domestic grumbles over inflation and unemployment, he enjoys the broad support of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the powerful Revolutionary Guards.

"Although this incident is significant in itself, it should not destabilise Iran," said Marie Bos, Middle East analyst at Control Risks in London, arguing that a local group without international connections was most likely to have been behind it.

Oil markets shrugged off the fuss.

"I expect that any backlash there might be from Ahmadinejad will be far more important to the oil market than the initial attack itself," said Paul Harris, head of natural resources risk management at Bank of Ireland. "You would expect the oil market to react if there is any attempt to link the attack to the current tensions with the West and the ramping-up of sanctions."

The Iranian authorities have so far reacted in a guarded fashion to the motorcade incident, whether trival or not. Their opponents in exile predictably saw it as a sign of unrest.

"It is obviously a reflection of the fact that all is not well and control is not total, contrary to conventional wisdom," said Mehrdad Khonsari, a secular Iranian dissident in London.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – South Lebanon has been calm in the four years since Israel’s 34-day war with Hezbollah, with both sides apparently reluctant to start a new conflict.

Yet the tranquility, which has encouraged a tourism and real estate boom in Lebanon, may prove deceptive.

BEIRUT, Aug 2 (Reuters) – South Lebanon has been calm in the four years since Israel’s 34-day war with Hezbollah, with both sides apparently reluctant to start a new conflict.

Yet the tranquillity, which has encouraged a tourism and real estate boom in Lebanon, may prove deceptive.

"Of course no one in the region is calling for war. But a pre-war mood is growing," wrote Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

Israel, Hezbollah and its close allies Syria and Iran all say they espouse peace but are preparing for battle. Belligerent talk, even if intended to deter, is fuelling an ugly atmosphere.

Tension over Iran’s disputed nuclear ambitions and a sense of despair about prospects for peace between Israel and Syria or the Palestinians also feed war fears in a region where U.S. power to influence events looks increasingly challenged.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) described the standoff between Israel and an "axis of resistance" as "exceptionally quiet and uniquely dangerous" in a report issued on Monday.

"The build-up in military forces and threat of an all-out war that would spare neither civilians nor civilian infrastructure, together with the worrisome prospect of its regionalisation, are effectively deterring all sides."

Israel, wary of any repeat of its 2006 failure to suppress Hezbollah, might also attack Syria next time. "The Israelis would want to send a tough message to the Syrians to cut off Hezbollah arms supply lines," said a senior diplomat in Beirut.

Just as Syria might get sucked into a new Israeli-Hezbollah round, Hezbollah would almost certainly find itself fighting Israel again in the event of any Israeli strike on Iran.

"Today, none of the parties can soberly contemplate the prospect of a conflict that would be uncontrolled, unprecedented and unscripted," said the ICG.

Yet Israel and its enemies have been talking incessantly about a coming showdown and pre-emptively blaming each other.

Iran’s U.N. envoy Mohammad Khazaee said on Saturday that if Israel "commits the slightest aggression on Iranian territory, we will set fire to the entire war front and Tel Aviv".

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while stating on Monday that "Iranians have never, ever favoured war", also mocked the notion of a U.S. or Israeli assault on Iranian nuclear sites.

For his part, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used his country’s army day on Sunday to declare that "the possibility of war is increasing" and to accuse Israel of blocking peace.



ISRAELI WARNINGS

Israel refuses to rule out attacking Iran to stop it from breaking its own presumed nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.

Even the United States has acknowledged that it is planning for a possible war on Iran, which denies Western assertions that its nuclear programme has military as well as civilian purposes.

Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff,asked by NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday if the military had a plan to attack Iran, replied: "We do."

Israel, which sees Hezbollah as a mere proxy of Iran, rather than as a group rooted in resistance to Israeli occupation of Lebanon, has multiplied its warnings to the Shi’ite guerrillas.

Israeli chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi accused them in July of turning civilian areas in Lebanon into "surface-to-surface rocket villages" in readiness for attacks on Israel, although he said Hezbollah did not have an interest in picking a fight now.

Hezbollah leader Saeed Hassan Nasrallah has vowed to hit back in kind for any Israeli attack on civilian targets.

None of this means a new war in Lebanon, often a cockpit for regional antagonisms, is inevitable or imminent. Apart from mutual deterrence, other constraints are in play, the ICG said.

UNIFIL, the peacekeeping force in the south that was beefed up after the 2006 war, acts as a buffer between Israel and Hezbollah, even if both sides accuse each other of violating the Security Council resolution which modified its mandate.

Hezbollah, now an integral part of Lebanon’s unity cabinet, has a stake in restraint. Israel’s government has also avoided escalation since 2006, responding in a measured way to a few cross-border rocket salvoes not thought to be Hezbollah’s work.

"U.S. President Barack Obama, likewise, far from the one-time dream of a new Middle East harboured by his predecessor, has no appetite for a conflagration that would jeopardise his peace efforts and attempts to restore U.S. credibility in the region," the ICG report argued.

But it said only Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Lebanese peace talks could address the political roots of the crisis. Short of that, it urged international efforts to enhance communications between the parties, defuse tensions and avoid costly missteps.

"Beneath the surface, tensions are mounting with no obvious safety valve," the conflict-prevention group said. (Editing by Jon Boyle)

BEIRUT (Reuters) – A U.N.-backed tribunal set up to try suspects in the 2005 assassination of Lebanese statesman Rafik al-Hariri on Thursday rejected charges by Lebanon’s Hezbollah armed group that its work is politically motivated.

“Experience of other international tribunals has shown that the results of the work of such institutions speak for themselves and contradict the unsubstantiated allegations of hostile interference,” Fatima Issawi, spokeswoman for the tribunal, told Reuters in written answers to emailed questions.