The plot in which an Iranian-American from Corpus Christi, Texas, notorious locally for his Clouseau-like dimwittedness, tries to hire a Mexican gangster to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington at the behest of the Iranian authorities has been greeted with incredulous hilarity across much of the world.
The allegations need to be taken seriously primarily because they show that the White House, by giving credence to them at the highest level, is seeking confrontation with Iran in the lead-up to next year's presidential election. It is shifting towards the Saudi position of seeing the hand of Iran behind its troubles in Iraq and the pro-democracy protests in Bahrain. The US is increasingly backing the Sunni side, and above all Saudi Arabia, in the struggle between Sunni and Shia which is escalating wherever the two communities live together.
The supposed conspiracy is bizarre even by the mendacious standards of stories pumped out by the Bush administration before 2003, purporting to show that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction. Manssor Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American who has lived for 30 years in the US, had a history of serial failure in small business ventures. He had a conviction for cheque fraud and a reputation for fumbling incompetence so great that his friends suspected he might have suffered brain damage when he was knifed and beaten up for flirting with Iranian-American women. But this man, with his rather sad history of personal and business failures, is suddenly appointed a frontline operator for Quds Force, the intelligence arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. » | Patrick Coburn | Sunday, October 16, 2011
