When the Bush administration called for the Middle East peace meeting in Annapolis, Iran was, perhaps, the only country in the region that was not invited. In fact, isolating Iran was one of the key objectives of the US-sponsored gathering and was hence treated very much like a pariah.

In response, Iran developed a strategy to undermine US policy. It included several steps. At the very beginning Tehran tried to convince the Arab world not to attend the meeting.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent envoys to Arab leaders, including Iran's big Arab ally - Syria - urging them to boycott the meeting. When Iran's efforts failed to produce any tangible results, it tried to embarrass Arab leaders by attacking their participation in the conference in a more direct way.

In a Friday sermon, the supreme guide of the Islamic revolution, Ali Khamenei, predicted that conferences such as Annapolis "are destined to failure even before they start". He expressed regret that so many countries in the region had decided to attend the conference.

"What results could they obtain from such conferences in the last 60 years that they want to repeat it now?" Khamenei concluded.

Iran went a further step in its opposition to the Annapolis meeting. It proposed a rival conference that would bring together all the anti-US parties in the region. The purpose of the conference was to form a united resistance front against US policies in the region.

The plan did not work out for the Iranians, however. The Palestinian rejectionist groups - most of them based in Damascus - shunned away the Iranian invitation, fearing that they may embarrass Syria which had already accepted a US invitation to attend Annapolis.

Failure to stop the march towards Annapolis forced Iran to try a different approach, reaching out to the Gulf Arab states. Ahmadinejad requested to attend the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit in Doha last week.

By speaking to the summit for the first time since the GCC was established in 1981, Ahmadinejad wanted to prove that Iran was not isolated and that the US's key allies in the region were willing to embrace Iran.

First time

During the summit Iran tried to court the Arab Gulf states by proposing security and economic pacts between the two shores of the Gulf. The Iranian offer did not impress the GCC leaders despite the fact that it was the first time that Iran proposed a formal pact with them.

Many have questioned Ahmadinejad's intentions when he in fact failed to mention his country's nuclear programme, the major source of concern for his neighbours. Instead, he talked only of scientific cooperation between his country and the Arab Gulf states, including in the energy sector.

From his side, the Iranian leader was almost sure that his offer would be rejected by the GCC countries, which rely heavily on Washington for security. Yet, his mere presence at the summit was a powerful Arab acknowledgment of Tehran's rising regional power; a pleasure that Ahmadinejad could not conceal.

Interestingly, however, the biggest support to Iran's position came from unlikely source; the CIA. In an unclassified summary of a secret US report released in Washington last week, the CIA indicated that Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons programme in late 2003 and has shown no signs of resuming it.

The report, which contradicted earlier assessment, embarrassed the Bush administration and complicated its efforts to further isolate Iran.

Ahmadinejad considered the report as a personal victory, touting it as vindication that Iran's nuclear programme is peaceful.

For now, Iran seems to have won this round of conflict with the Bush administration. It needs to do more however to get completely off the hook.

Dr Marwan Al Kabalan is a lecturer in media and international relations, Faculty of Political Science and Media, Damascus University, Syria.