'Helpfully Neutral'.

Call it a tale of two Tehran embassy seiges. The first, which occurred on the day U.S. forces took Baghdad, saw 350 students and clerics gather to chant antiwar slogans outside the British Embassy in downtown Tehran. It was a strangely muted affair--a small homemade British flag was torched, and the protesters quietly dispersed. The other, three days later, was much more passionate. A crowd of jubilant Iraqi exiles broke into the Iraqi Embassy compound, tore up pictures of Saddam Hussein and scattered documents before being evicted by police. And how did the Iranian authorities, members of the Axis of Evil, react? "Such actions only isolate Iran," said Taha Hashemi, secretary of the politically powerful Qom Seminary's cultural office. "The age of attacking and occupying foreign embassies is over." The twist: Hashemi was talking about the British, not the Iraqi Embassy, demonstration.

For a country high on George W. Bush's hit list, Iran has been surprisingly friendly toward the United States of late. Earlier this month Iran blocked the escape of about 250 Ansar al-Islam radicals across the mountainous Iraq-Iran border, forcing them to surrender to U.S. and Kurdish forces. During the U.S. attack on Ansar, American warplanes used Iranian airspace--and Tehran turned a blind eye. True, Iranian leaders have condemned the U.S. "army of occupation." And Washington fears that some of the senior Afghan-trained Ansar jihadis were spirited away by sympathizers in Iran last month. But, says one Western diplomat in Tehran, there's no doubt that Iran has been at least "helpfully neutral" toward the Coalition during this war. It seems to have paid off: while U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been sniping at Syria for allowing military equipment into Iraq and for aiding fleeing Iraqi Baathists, the administration has been strangely silent on Iran.

In part, Tehran's conciliatory attitude is dictated by self- preservation. Iran has nothing to gain, and lots to lose, by antagonizing a superpower on the warpath. But there are more subtle reasons. Reformers like President Mohammed Khatami "genuinely want a rapprochment with the United States, sooner or later," says the former Turkish ambassador to Iran Turgut Tulumen. They also know that confrontation with the United States would strengthen support for ...