I think its a complete waste of time to try to distinguish between west asian teams including Iran. They are all more or less on the same level today. Bahrain beats SA, SA beats UAE, UAE beats Bahrain, Qatar beats Bahrain, Bahrain beats Jordan, Jordan beats Iran...and on and on. They are all on the same level and the daily form and pure luck will decide who wins games. This situation however means Irans football has not developed any further since 1978 while others did catch up enormously.
Teams to watch are the old and well known asian powerhouses like Korea, Japan and Australia and i would count China and Uzbekistan in as well. China is not the same old team that used to lose to Iran on regular basis and Uzbekistan is basically a european team with all those players of russian background.