http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/14/ ... %E2%80%9D/
gee, i wonder if they recorded any of this, or if they forgot to turn on their little devices . . .Manssor J. Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American used car salesman from Corpus Christi, Texas, has been indicted as the chief conspirator working for Iranian intelligence. He is charged with promising to pay $1.5 million to Los Zetas – one of the Mexican drug cartels – to kill the Saudi ambassador at a restaurant in Washington.
The FBI claims that Arbabsiar told the Drug Enforcement Agency’s informant – posing as a high-ranking member of Los Zetas – that it would be “no big deal” if many others died at the restaurant, possibly including United States senators. He also proposed bombing the Israeli embassy.
. . .If even one US senator died in a terrorist bombing in Washington, if anything larger than a firecracker detonated outside the Israeli embassy, US bombers would be raining high explosive on Iranian targets within 24 hours. Why would Iran want to invite such a response?
Gareth Porter points out on our site this weekend that the whole “plot” has the familiar aroma of an FBI sting . . .
ah, but that's not how power politics works, is it? way too much like (weak) "appeasement" in an election year . . . (never "negotiate with terrorists" . . .)To repeat: Iran doesn’t want war with the US. Quite the reverse. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently tried to refloat the Tehran Research Reactor nuclear fuel swap. He proposed that Iran suspend production of some uranium-enrichment activities in exchange for fuel supplies from the United States. On September 29 the International Herald Tribune ran an op-ed piece saying the proposal was well worth consideration by the US government.
so . . . perhaps this "foiled plot" might help illustrate my point about how these set-ups can and do significantly influence (and "justify") policy. no, not war in this case. (but pushing us closer, again?)All such hopes of a warming in relations have now been snuffed out, most vigorously by Obama on Thursday, endorsing the Attorney General Holder’s wild allegations and threatening ferocious new sanctions against Iran.
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here's another take on it:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/n ... -plot.html (Laura Secor, 10 / 14 / 11)
Iran’s élite, secretive Quds Force, the division of the Revolutionary Guards responsible for operations abroad, allegedly entrusted its most sensitive operation to Mansour Arbabsiar, a Texas used-car salesman with a criminal record, a history of drug and alcohol abuse, and a reputation for fecklessness and financial problems. He had lost his home to foreclosure and his wife to divorce when he took up the assassination plot. He had no proved fealty—personal, religious, or ideological—to the Iranian regime. What he did have was a need for cash, and the disadvantage of being easily traced to the other alleged conspirators, one of whom was his cousin. Moreover, he was apparently meant to outsource the operation to a Mexican drug cartel—known to be infiltrated by American law enforcement—which would dispatch operatives the Iranians had never met or even seen, let alone vetted. All of this was casually arranged on regular international telephone lines, and paid for by direct wire transfers in amounts so large as to trigger automatic federal monitoring . . . It hardly sounds like the Iran we know, a regime that is paranoid and opaque even in its quotidian affairs, and nothing if not professional in its covert operations abroad.
Part is the creeping suspicion that too many people have too much invested in stoking hysteria. The Iranian regime wants its people to believe the Americans will attack, because it believes this will help it hang on to power. The U.S. government wants the Iranians to believe it just might attack, because otherwise the United States has very little leverage in nuclear negotiations. The Israelis want the Iranians to fear an American attack, because they believe this will deter Iranian moves against Israeli interests. The Saudis, too, would like to use a bellicose American ally as leverage against Iran, their regional rival. Then, there’s American domestic politics. The Republicans bluster against Iran to prove that they are tough and that the Democrats are appeasers; the Democrats bluster against Iran to prove that they are no such thing. The neoconservative right encourages the conclusion that the only solution is military; the anti-imperialist left forever argues that the neoconservatives are secretly steering America toward war. It could be my sheer perversity that prevents me from believing what everyone wants me to believe. Or it could be that none of these parties have satisfactorily proved that anyone actually in power believes an attack on Iran would advance American interests more than it would set them back.
