By Pepe Escobar
October 14,
2011
No one ever lost
money betting on the dull predictability of the US government. Just as Occupy
Wall Street is firing imaginations all across the spectrum ~ piercing the
noxious revolving door between government and casino capitalism ~ Washington
brought us all down to earth, sensationally advertising an Iranian cum Mexican
cartel terror plot straight out of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise.
The potential victim: Adel al-Jubeir, the ambassador in the US of that lovely
counter-revolutionary Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
FBI Director Robert
Mueller insisted the Iran-masterminded terror plot "reads like the pages
of a Hollywood script". It does. And quite a sloppy script at that.
Fast and Furious
duo Paul Walker/Vin Diesel wouldn't be caught dead near it.
The good guys in
this Washington production are the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
In the words of Attorney General Eric Holder, they uncovered "a deadly
plot directed by factions of the Iranian government to assassinate a foreign
Ambassador on US soil with explosives".
Holder added that
the bombing of the Saudi embassy in Washington was also part of the plan.
Subsequent spinning
amplified that to planned bombings of the Israeli embassy in Washington, as
well as the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires.
The Justice
Department has peddled quite a murky story ~ Operation Red Coalition (no, you
can’t make that stuff up) ~ centred on one Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old
holding both Iranian and US passports and an Iran-based co-conspirator, Gholam
Shakuri, an alleged member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps's (IRGC)
Quds Force.
Arbabsiar allegedly
had a series of encounters in Mexico with a DEA mole posing as a Mexican drug
cartel heavy weight. The Iranian-American seems to have been convinced that the
mole was a member of the hardcore Zetas Mexican cartel, and reportedly bragged
he was being "directed by high-ranking members of the Iranian
government", including a cousin who was "a member of the Iranian army
but did not wear a uniform".
On top of it, he
told the DEA mole that his Iranian government buddies could come up with
"tons of opium" for the Mexican cartel (an Afghan connection,
perhaps). Then they discussed a "number of violent missions" complete
with Arbabsiar bragging about bombing a packed Washington restaurant used by
the Saudi ambassador.
Holder characterized
the whole thing as a $1.5m "murder-for-hire" plan. Arbabsiar was
arrested only a few days ago, on September 29, at JFK airport in New York. He
allegedly confessed, according to the Justice Department. Shakuri for his part
is still at large.
Holder was adamant:
"The United States is committed to hold Iran accountable for its
actions." Yet he stopped short of stating the plot was approved by the
highest levels of the Iranian government.
So what next?
War?
Hold your horses;
Washington should first think about asking the Chinese if they’re willing to
foot the bill (the answer will be no).
Predictably, the
proverbial torrent of US "officials" came out with guns blazing,
spinning everything in sight. An alarmed Pentagon will be increasing
surveillance over the Quds Force and "Iran’s actions" in Iraq,
Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. Former US ambassadors stated that, "it's
an attack on the United States to attack this ambassador". Washington is
about to impose even more sanctions against Iran; and Washington is urgently
taking the matter to the UN Security Council.
What next? An R2P
("responsibility to protect") resolution ordering NATO to protect
every House of Saud minion across the world by bombing Iran into regime change?
Ali Akbar
Javanfekr, a spokesman for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at least
introduced a little bit of common sense.
"I think the
US government is busy fabricating a new scenario and history has shown both the
US government and the CIA have a lot of experience in fabricating these
scenarios ... I think their goal is to reach the American public. They want to
take the public's mind off the serious domestic problems they're facing these
days and scare them with fabricated problems outside the country."
Iran has not even
established yet that these two characters are actually Iranian citizens.
The Iranian
government ~ which prides itself on a logical approach to diplomacy ~ would
have to have been inoculated with a terminal Stuxnet-style foolishness virus to
behave in such a counterproductive manner, by targeting a high-profile foreign
policy adviser to King Abdullah on American soil.
The official
Iranian news agency IRNA described the plot as "America's new propaganda
scenario" against Iran.
As for the
Washington mantra that "Iran has been insinuating itself into many of the
struggles in the Middle East", that's undiluted Saudi propaganda. In fact
it's the House of Saud who's been conducting the fierce counter-revolution that
has smashed any possibility of an Arab Spring in the Persian Gulf ~ from the
invasion and repression of Bahrain to the rash pre-emption of protests inside
Saudi Arabia's Shia-dominated eastern provinces.
The whole thing
smells like a flimsy pretext for a casus belli. The timing of the announcement
couldn't be more suspicious. White House national security advisor Thomas E.
Donilon briefed King Abdullah of the plot no less than two weeks ago, in a
three-hour meeting in Riyadh. Meanwhile the US government has been carrying not
plots, but targeted assassinations of US citizens, as in the Anwar al-Awlaki
case.
So why now?
Holder is caught in
yet another scandal ~ on whether he told lies regarding Operation Fast and
Furious (no, you can't make this stuff up), a federal gun sting through which
scores of US weapons ended up in the hands of ~ here they come again ~ Mexican
drug cartels.
So how to bury Fast
and Furious, the economic abyss, the 10 years of war in Afghanistan, the
increasing allure of Occupy Wall Street ~ not to mention the Saudi role in
smashing the spirit of the Arab Spring?
By uncovering a
good ol' al-Qaeda style plot on US soil, on top of it conducted by
"evil" Iran.
Al-Qaeda and Tehran
sharing top billing; not even Cheney and Rumsfeld in their heyday could come up
with something like this.
Long live GWOT (the
global war on terror).
And long live the
neo-con spirit; remember, real men go to Tehran~ and the road starts now.
Pepe Escobar is the
roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is named Obama Does
Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
the iranian Press TV is looking like the UK government is going to ban it
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