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It may be that this alleged perp isn't even "fast and furious," let alone "brazen and bizarre":"He's no mastermind," David Tomscha, who once owned a used car lot with Arbabsiar, told the Associated Press. "I can't imagine him thinking up a plan like that. I mean, he didn't seem all that political. He was more of a businessman."
"His socks would not match," Tom Hosseini, his former college roommate, told the New York Times. "He was always losing his keys and his cellphone. He was not capable of carrying out this plan."
Friends told the Times that Arbabsiar smoked marijuana and drank alcohol freely and had a string of businesses, "selling horses, ice cream, used cars and gyro sandwiches," leaving a "trail of liens, business-related lawsuits and angry creditors" in his wake.Gary Sick, a former member of the US National Security Council and an expert on Iran and the Middle East, thinks the story as presented may sound farfetched (as opposed to brazen):
Iran has never conducted — or apparently even attempted — an assassination or a bombing inside the US. And it is difficult to believe that they would rely on a non-Islamic criminal gang to carry out this most sensitive of all possible missions. In this instance, they allegedly relied on at least one amateur and a Mexican criminal drug gang that is known to be riddled with both Mexican and US intelligence agents.Yes: let's have more detailed evidence, please, before we make with the bombs and stuff. Now, I don't really think the government's announcement of the alleged Iranian plot was designed to provide Eric Holder a reprieve from his problems with Darrel Issa's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (Issa is a troublemaker with plenty of outstanding questions about his own pees and queues, anyway.) But can you blame Republicans if they try to paint the announcement as Obama-administration trickery? If this plot had been announced while the President was still named Bush-Cheney, what would be your gut reaction to it?
Whatever else may be Iran’s failings, they are not noted for utter disregard of the most basic intelligence tradecraft, e.g. discussing an ultra-covert operation on an open international line between Iran and the US. Yet that is what happened here.
Perhaps this operation is just as it appears. But at a minimum both the public and the Congress should demand more detailed evidence before taking any rash or irreversible action.
at first I thought this was a total non-story that you were wasting time even reading. I hadn't bothered with it before you wrote the first commentary.
ReplyDeleteNow I don't know what to make of it. If it's a ruse, the kind of fake terror crisis Bush always came up with when he was blue then why take it to the UN and risk total global embarrassment?
If it's a real thing, incompetent and ineffective as it was, then it's not a big deal other than to stay alert.
And if it's some small shit someone wants to puff up into a war with Iran then no one is going to bite-- now. A Dem administration lied the country into one useless war (VietNam) but won't ever again. But nice going, if they end up giving some lamebrain Republican administration something to lie about. Those guys are able to start useless wars out of air.
Those are my questions, but I wouldn't dismiss the power of a Democratic administration to launch a quagmire war. The current President has already had a bit of practice at that, and he would have plenty of allies in Congress (bipartisan) for a new Enterprise as long as it involves huge no-bid contracts for all Halliburton-related business activities and Lockheed-Martin.
ReplyDeletewell, I guess if you can't start something productive to increase employment, break windows...
ReplyDeleteI don't think this amounts to some pointless chest-thumping exercise by the Obama administration. No competent strategist could possibly believe that stirring up things with Iran would take anyone's eye off the unemployment situation---it just makes no sense. I feel there's something fishy about the whole thing, but I can't think of any hypothesis that would justify the political risk the administration takes when pulling a stunt like this. Who knows... maybe to stir something up between the Saudis and the Iranians at this specific point in time? But why?
ReplyDelete