Iran president to show off influence on Iraq visit

By Edmund Blair

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes a landmark trip to Iraq on Sunday seeking to show that Iran is an influential player in Iraqi politics which the United States can ill afford to isolate or ignore.

The first visit by an Iranian president since the 1979 Islamic revolution aims to boost business and other ties with a country with which Iran fought an eight-year war in the 1980s.

But the significance of the two-day trip, say analysts and diplomats, is that it is happening at all when Washington accuses Tehran of supplying weapons to militias that are killing U.S. troops. Tehran denies such charges.

"The main issue will be the foreign policy success of going to Iraq and coming back ... under the eyes of the Americans, when the Americans are talking about isolating Iran," said one Western diplomat in Tehran.

At home, the Iranian president may welcome a foreign policy success to distract attention from the economy and double-digit inflation before a March parliamentary election that will test his popularity and indicate his chance for re-election in 2009.

Iranian officials have given little advance information about the visit.

Iraqi officials have urged Washington and Tehran, which have not had diplomatic ties for almost three decades, not to use Iraq as a proxy battleground to fight out their differences, which include a row over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The United States is pushing for a third round of U.N. sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt nuclear work Washington says is aimed at making atomic bombs. Tehran denies this.