NEWS ANALYSIS : Iran Could Emerge as Big Winner in the Gulf Crisis : Mideast: In the wake of Iraq’s peace bid and surging oil prices, Tehran could gain even more politically.

After 11 years of political and economic isolation and a series of false starts in its rapprochement with the outside world, Iran has found that the crisis in the Persian Gulf suddenly has turned it once again into a major player on the world scene.

And this time, much to the surprise of many Americans--and presumably many Iranians as well--Iran shares many common interests with the West. Iranian leaders find themselves being courted by such unlikely countries as Kuwait--whose ships it not long ago tried to sink--and the United States, which is now keeping Tehran regularly briefed on its actions.

Already, Iran has reaped a series of benefits from the crisis:

* Higher oil prices and the cutoff of oil exports from Iraq and Kuwait have allowed Iran to score a market coup worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the last two weeks, oil industry experts say.

* Iraq’s attack on Kuwait has forced the other nations of the Persian Gulf, after years of resistance, to begin to accept Iran’s longstanding insistence that it is the only power in the region that can keep Iraq in check.

* The intense Western focus on the sins of Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, has improved Iran’s image in Western eyes.

* And Saddam Hussein’s offer Wednesday to accept Iran’s terms for a final peace agreement ending the Iran-Iraq War has provided what the Iranians are hailing as a “tremendous victory”--reversing through diplomacy the country’s losses on the battlefield.

But those benefits could be dwarfed by the rewards Iran eventually may reap as the crisis continues.

If the U.S.-led campaign against Iraq prevails, Iran automatically will become, once again, the dominant power in the gulf region.

If the United States fails and Iraq emerges triumphant, Iran will have suffered a major strategic setback. But even so, it will find itself ardently courted by other gulf nations who will see it as the only insurance against Iraqi attack, Middle East experts say.

And if the confrontation becomes a lengthy stalemate, both Iraq and its opponents will continue to maneuver to keep Iran on their side.

All that with virtually no expense on Iran’s part.

“The Iranians must be wondering how on earth everything fell into their laps so wonderfully,” said Geoffrey Kemp of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The windfall could hardly have come at a better time. The 1988 cease-fire in the eight-year war with Iraq left Iran bleeding and impoverished. The country lost hundreds of thousands of young men. Its cities and the western provinces bordering Iraq were devastated. The country’s vital oil industry is operating far below capacity because of years of under-investment.

Overall, Iranian officials estimate that rebuilding their economy could cost $350 billion.

Because of those needs, Iran has been looking to the West, seeking credits and trade that would help get its economy back in shape.

Over the last year, Iran has improved relations with France and West Germany and has settled most of its disputes with Britain arising from the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death threat against author Salman Rushdie, noted Ruhi Ramazani, a University of Virginia professor and an Iran expert. Iran also is widely assumed to have been involved in the release last spring of two American hostages in Lebanon.

And in the months immediately preceding the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran’s foreign minister, had orchestrated a warming of Iranian-Kuwaiti ties. During the war with Iraq, Iran had attacked Kuwait, seeking to block its shipping, because of Kuwait’s support for Iraq.

But Iran’s diplomatic initiatives were slow to bring tangible economic benefits. Until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait forced both Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil off the world market, Iran was “the supplier of last resort,” said petroleum industry expert Philip Verleger of Washington’s Institute for International Economics.

“Because of their behavior during the 1980s, people were very reluctant to buy from them,” Verleger said. “Iran couldn’t sell its oil.”

As a result, Iran was pumping millions of barrels of oil into storage tanks in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and into tankers floating around the world. But in the past two weeks Iran has been able to unload huge amounts of that oil--perhaps, industry sources estimate, 20 million barrels, or $500 million worth.

Ironically, Verleger said, by selling those stocks, Iran, which has often been seen as an advocate of ever-higher oil prices, has probably done more than any Western government to stabilize the international oil market.

In addition, noted Joseph Story of Gulf Consulting Services, Iranian sales agents have been energetically canvassing former Iraqi and Kuwaiti customers in Europe and Asia, hoping to increase the country’s long-term share of the oil market.

Beyond the immediacy of economics, Iran can expect long-term strategic benefits from the crisis, even though the country is likely to stay on the sidelines and not take a major, high-profile role on either side.

In answer to a question at a news conference Thursday, President Bush said he was “not concerned” about a possible warming of relations between Iran and Iraq because of Iraq’s peace offer, a view echoed by most analysts.

“The Iranians were double-crossed, invaded, plundered and gassed by the Iraqis. The cost was 400,000 lives . . . ,” said James Bill, director of the Center for International Studies at Virginia’s College of William and Mary. “They’re unlikely to forgive and forget.”

Iraq may hope that Iran will serve as a conduit for trade, to get around the international embargo. But analysts doubt that will happen.

“There will always be illicit border trade, but nothing crucial,” said William Quandt, a former National Security Council official now with the Brookings Institution.

Iran itself has indicated that any peace agreement with Iraq is totally separate from its condemnation of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait or its willingness to go along with an embargo.

Under both the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic, Iran consistently has argued that its strength was vital as a counterweight to Iraq. Now, others in the region are beginning to accept that argument.

“The world now understands the importance of the strategic balance between the two traditional powers of the region,” said Ken Katzman, a Middle East expert at Defense Systems, a Washington consulting firm, and a former U.S. intelligence analyst.

The result is likely to be less opposition to Iran from Arab states in the gulf and from the West. Relations with the United States, still bitterly opposed by radicals within Iran and blocked by the continued captivity of U.S. hostages in Lebanon, probably will remain distant, but even that may begin to change, several analysts said.

Within Iran, radical opponents of President Hashemi Rafsanjani have long argued that America is, in Khomeini’s phrase, “a paper tiger.” But the massive U.S. buildup in Saudi Arabia “has completely discredited that claim” and “strengthened the hands of moderate elements,” argued Monsour Farhand, a former Iranian diplomat now in the United States.

If the United States prevails in the current confrontation, the long-sought restoration of relations with Iran could be one result.