Iran Analysis: Sometimes A Plot is Just A Plot (Dreyfuss)

Manssor ArbabsiarRobert Dreyfuss offers Tehran Bureau his possibility for the alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador --- this article should be compared to the interpretation, posted in a separate entry, by Gareth Porter as well as to EA's coverage since Tuesday:

The bizarre case of Mansoor Arbabsiar leaves plenty of room to be skeptical about its true nature. That doesn't mean, however, that analysts and Iran experts are free to concoct missing data points to fill in their own preconceived notions of what must have occurred. As William of Occam might have observed with razor-like precision: Sometimes a plot is just a plot.

The most troubling aspect of the case is the reported involvement of Abdul Reza Shahlai, a commander in the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, who was named in a Treasury Department sanctions document on October 11. Shahlai, the unnamed "cousin" of Arbabsiar in the original Justice Department charging document, was named along with his boss, Hamed Abdollahi, another IRGC-QF commander, who, according to Treasury, "coordinated aspects of this operation." It was Shahlai, under Abdollahi's direction, who approved up to $5 million for the scheme that was designed first to kidnap, and then to assassinate, Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

Shahlai, Iraq watchers know, was reputedly the mastermind behind the January 2007 massacre of five American troops in Karbala, Iraq, at the start of the surge ordered that month by President Bush. According to a well-reported story in the Washington Post, Shahlai was the "guiding hand" behind the team of commandos who carried out that operation, under the nominal guise of partisans of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Following that event, the Post reports, "The U.S. military found a 22-page memo that detailed preparations for the operation and tied it to the Quds Force, a branch of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Treasury officials singled out Shahlai as 'the final approving and coordinating authority' for the Iran-based training of members of Sadr's militia before they went back to Iraq to attack coalition forces."

It isn't clear, yet, what the relationship among Arbabsiar, Shahlai, and Abdollahi is, nor is it clear what the United States knows about Abdollahi's role. Still murkier is the question of how much General Qassem Suleimani, the IRGC-QF commander, knew about his underlings' scheme, or whether he knew anything at all. And, further up the food chain, it gets murkier still. So far, no U.S. official has charged that the overall commander of the IRGC, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, or his superiors, including Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, knew anything about it.

As strange as it may seem, it's entirely possible that the witting participants in a plan that, had it taken place, could have triggered an all-out U.S. attack on Iran's military facilities and nuclear research installations didn't rank very high. That, in part, might explain the staggeringly inept nature of the plot, which involved easily traced transfers of large sums of money to unvetted bank accounts, clumsily disguised, barely coded conversations over open phone lines, and the plotters' reliance on a bungling, pot-smoking Iranian-American businessman with a criminal record. Still, when drugs, guns, and money are involved, participants are not usually members of Mensa. In particular, there have been media reports that Shahlai, Arbabsiar's cousin, was something of a drug-running gangster himself, which could explain why he gravitated to a plan intended to contract the attack on al-Jubeir with Los Zetas, a vastly powerful Mexican mafia organization.

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