KEY POINTS:
Baghdad's Residency Office, a bustling maze of corridors and smokey rooms, is a place of Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
Controlled by a Shiite political party, it means foreigners who do not want to pay a bribe shuffle from desk to desk to get the signatures, stamps and counter signatures, and
then more stamps, required to leave the country.
Only one group is rushed through without a cursory glance: agents who breeze through with arms laden with stacks of passports. All of them from Iran. Some are pilgrims to Shiite holy sites whom you see streaming across the Shatt al-Arab waterway in the heavily laden ferries at festival time and plying the motorways in packed minibuses. Others are returning exiles, many of whose families hold only Iranian passports. Others are diplomats and businessmen.
But in the past few months, George W. Bush has signed a presidential order targeting another group that his administration alleges is in Iraq: Iranians - Revolutionary Guards and intelligence officers.
Iran, the Shiite state, is destabilising Iraqi politics and co-ordinating attacks on United States forces by Shiite insurgents, claim the Americans.
The claims are not new. Throughout last year, officials dropped heavy hints about the presence of Revolutionary Guards in Iraq, although usually without evidence to support the claims.
What has changed in the past few days is that rumours have been translated into public accusations in Washington, amid moves by the US military to break up what it alleges are "Iranian networks" in Iraq. This time administration officials claim they have evidence.
Last week, US troops in helicopters launched a raid on an Iranian facility in Kurdistan - claiming afterwards they had arrested a high-ranking Revolutionary Guard officer among six Iranians seized and found maps of neighbourhoods in Baghdad in which Sunnis "could be" evicted.
US officials also claimed they had found proof there of Iranian involvement in last summer's conflict in Lebanon. None of this "evidence" has yet been produced for public scrutiny.
After last Thursday's announcement by Bush of the immediate raising of US troop numbers in Iraq by more than 20,000 - the much heralded "surge" which is widely recognised as the last chance to rescue the mission to enforce stability on conflict-torn Iraq - the question is increasingly being asked in Washington and the region: what comes next? Many believe Bush has planned a second - equally high risk - strategy to run in parallel with the surge: to move against growing Iranian influence in Iraq, snubbing the key recommendation of the Iraq Study Group and the will of the British Government that it should talk to Tehran, not threaten it.
It is high risk because it is in danger of alienating precisely those Shiite politicians in the Iraqi Government who can help to stabilise Baghdad. Many of those politicians were protected by Iran during Saddam's reign and look to Tehran, not Washington, as their obvious ally.
That ratcheting up of pressure on Iran is getting more visible by the day, even if new US Defence Secretary Robert Gates insisted to Congress last week under fierce questioning that US troops would not touch Iranian soil.
That may be the case.
But in February, a second US carrier strike force, accompanying the USS John C. Stennis, will arrive in the Gulf to join the carrier the USS Eisenhower and its group, in a marked new show of force.
Extra US F-16 fighter planes also have reportedly flown into Turkey too, ostensibly for a joint war game. There is talk, too, of the US deploying extra Patriot anti-missile batteries in the Middle East.
Bush, though, challenges his critics: "We have a new strategy with a new mission: helping secure the population, especially in Baghdad ... Our plan puts Iraqis in the lead."
- OBSERVER
