As reported on Yahoo.com on Feb. 25, 2008,
Tehran signs pact to help rebuild Baghdad
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Tehran on Monday signed an agreement with Baghdad to help execute projects in the infrastructure and services sectors in the Iraqi capital.
The Yahoo article continues:
The Yahoo article was linked in a post on Iranian.com that complained that Iran had not yet restored the Iranian city of Abadan, nearly totally devastated by Iraqi bombing in the eight-year long Iraq war against Iran:
There is no trace of re-construction in Abadan.... The city whose girls were portrayed so beautifully ...and whose boys spent their evenings standing by the palm trees in those girls’ neighborhoods. And now it is a city without a plan, without beauty, without vivacious boys, and full of walls where bullet wounds have not healed yet.... This city will have to become my country’s most beautiful, warmest, and most exciting city again.
Apparantly Abadan will have to wait until Baghdad -- and Lebanon too, by the way -- are rebuilt, with significant contributions from the stressed and sanctioned Iranian economy.
Here's the rationale and the business part of Tehran's deal with Baghdad:
"The municipality of Tehran must stand by Iraqis in these hard conditions," said Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the mayor of Tehran, after signing a pact with Saber al-Isawi, director of Baghdad municipality.
Qalibaf said the municipality of Tehran aims to help its Baghdad counterpart in building roads and water projects and also constructing cultural and entertainment centres. Isawi said the two municipalities have agreed to set up a company that would execute the projects. The company would have offices in Baghdad and Tehran to coordinate the implementation of the projects, he added.
And the public relations bit:
The agreement between Tehran and Baghdad comes ahead of the two-day visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Iraq which begins on March 2. ... the first by an Iranian president to Iraq since the creation of the Islamic republic after the 1979 revolution which ousted the shah.
A little historical background:
Iran and Iraq fought a devastating war between 1980 and 1988 in which around one million people died. But the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime in 2003 led to a marked improvement in relations with the new Shiite-dominated government in Iraq.
Finished with a soupcon of irony:
Commercial ties have blossomed and Iranian Shiites increasingly go on pilgrimage to the holy shrines in Iraq's central cities of Najaf and Karbala.
But posters on Iranian.com are not quite so sanguine about the "commercial ties that have blossomed" between Tehran and Baghdad; they'd like to see their own towns rebuilt;
I read in the news that Tehran has signed a pact to help rebuild Baghdad. If it weren’t so painful to contemplate this news, it could actually be amusing! After almost 20 years since the Iran-Iraq War, many Iranian cities are yet to return to their original state after the war’s destruction.
Four years since the Bam Earthquake, the city continues to be in ruins without tangible hopes for a solid reconstruction. It would seem that as far as reconstructions go, Baghdad should be waiting its turn on a long list of reconstruction projects Iran will have to tend inside Iran, some of them 20 years overdue.
Iranian bloggers are fed up with mullah/Islamic rule;
Sick of Islamist and some others No one is really supporting IR,
But they are thoughtful, analytical, hopeful:
but many are looking at the options on the table. ...I prefer [the Islamic Republic] to almost all the oppositions out there and/or any foreign based replacements. I think that majority of us just don't want another revolution or war or any thing that pours blood. We just want Iran to be normal, and some of us, including myself think that it is possible to reach that with this regime.
This Iranian blogger seems to echo the combined despair and hope many Americans have about their government:
IRI is modifiable to me. They are not the crazy dictators that you might think, although they are not a secular democracy either. So we are stuck at this juncture. I think IR is maturing up and has shown hope for growth. We have had 3 presidents that were very different than each other. Can you say that IR has stopped fully and will not change? I can't. Maybe that's what separates some of us from one another. Mullahs have no role in the future of Iran, we will push them out by the gradual reforms, which are taking place yearly. In this process, we have lost many great people and my own family has suffered. But what can we do?