Iran: The New Middle East Regional Super Power

Iran is confident and emboldened by it's new self-concept. Clearly, it believes it's time has come and the US is in decline in it's influence in the Middle East. Clearly, they are not worried about the possibility of war. Hardliners know that for every civilian killed by an Israeli and/or US bombing campaign there will be 10 Iranians willing to die in the fight for Iran.
WaPo

Behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric lies a conviction that is widely shared here: Iran is a rising power in the Middle East while the United States is in decline -- and now is the moment for Iran to emerge as a regional superpower.


You hear versions of this cocky nationalism in almost every conversation. And when you look around this surprisingly modern metropolis of 12 million people, it's easy to think that Iran's time may indeed have come. The problem is that its national ambitions are wrapped today in the fanatical language of Ahmadinejad, who emerged from among the hardest of this country's hard-core Islamic revolutionaries. He and his followers seem eager for the confrontation that lies ahead.


The situation in Iraq bolsters Iranian confidence in its test of wills against America. As the Iranians view it, the United States has stumbled into a pit from which it cannot easily escape. There is a disagreement here between pragmatists who see in America's troubles an opportunity to open a mutually beneficial dialogue with the Great Satan and hard-liners who would rather let America suffer.


[...]Iran officially embraced this idea of dialogue on Iraq early this year, in a statement from Ali Larijani, Iran's national security adviser. But the Bush administration pulled back, worried that talks with Tehran about Iraq would obstruct the administration's larger goal of containing the Iranian nuclear program. The failure of the initiative undercut the advocates of dialogue and emboldened the hard-liners.


Ahmadinejad dismisses the idea of talks with the United States about Iraq. When I asked the Iranian president at a news conference here Tuesday whether he thought the two countries should discuss ways to stabilize Baghdad, he responded with invective. "The people of the [Iraqi] nation hate you now. You should go out and leave them," he said. Running through all of his statements was the same supremely self-confident theme: Iran's moment has come, and America's has gone.