Analysis: Iran will huff and puff over intervention - but don't expect anything more than bluster

The arrival of 1,000 Saudi troops in Bahrain has given Iran a propaganda victory while stoking tensions between Riyadh and Tehran, the oil-rich region's rival powerhouses.

Bahrain's Sunni leaders have long claimed their domestic opponents - the island's Shiite majority - are agents of Shiite Iran.

But there is little chance that Iran will, as some US pundits claim, take reciprocal action. Any such Iranian intervention would provoke international outrage, a prospect Tehran would not relish, as it struggles to cope with sanctions imposed because of its controversial nuclear programme. For all its bluster, Tehran knows Bahrain's rulers had every right under long-standing agreements to seek help from friendly Arab neighbours to bolster its overstretched police force.

Iran will, however, huff and puff on the diplomatic and public relations fronts. Its leaders have already shamelessly attempted to take the moral high ground on the Arab uprisings. They have repeatedly urged governments across the region to allow their peoples to protest peacefully - even as the Iranian regime brutally suppressed its own pro-democracy movement.

Iran's parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, gleefully proclaimed yesterday that its Gulf Arab rivals "have placed themselves against the people's wrath". Predictably, he claimed Saudi Arabia's military intervention was at the behest of the US. But some saw the intervention as a slap in the face for the US.

Arab affairs expert Jean-Franois Seznec pointed out that last Saturday US defence secretary Robert Gates visited Bahrain, where he called for real reforms. Within hours of his departure, Saudi troops were called in - a demonstration of "disdain for his efforts to reach a negotiated solution", Seznec argued.