Source: New York Post
March 4, 2008 — Iran’s radical president ended a red-carpet visit to Baghdad yesterday without getting the photo-op he desperately wanted with Iraq’s most powerful cleric.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had wanted to visit the holy city of Najaf to see Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, but that event was scrubbed due to a scheduling problem, according to an Iraqi TV channel, al-Sharquiyah.
Ahmadinejad, who has been under fire recently in Tehran, reportedly wanted TV footage of his meeting with Sistani to counter opposition from powerful mullahs in Iran’s parliamentary elections on March 14.
The hard-line president used the two-day visit to Iraq to demand that the United States withdraw from the Mideast. The foreign presence in Iraq is an "insult to the regional nations and a humiliation," Ahmadinejad said.
He was kept away from street protests against his visit and was warmly welcomed by Iraqi President Jabal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, and Iraqi Shiite leaders.
Iran and Iraq fought a brutal eight-year war that killed 1 million people in the 1980s, but Ahmadinejad said it was America that sows hostility in the region.
"We believe the powers that came over the seas, traveling thousands of kilometers, these powers should leave this region and hand over the affairs to the people and governments in the region," Ahmadinejad said.
"People have not seen anything from the foreign presence in this region but more destruction and division."
He said Iran and Iraq are "brotherly" nations that share many beliefs and values. "Of course, dictators and foreigners have tried to tarnish and undermine the emotional relations between the two states," he said.
He wound up the two-day visit with a nearly hourlong press conference in which he dismissed US accusations that his country is training extremists to attack GIs and Muslim rivals in Iraq.
Ahmadinejad is the first Iranian president to visit Iraq. Such a trip would have been unthinkable during the Saddam Hussein era, but Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government has been trying to normalize ties with Iran’s cleric-led Islamic republic.