USA: Feds Foil Own Saudi Assassination Plot: Pin it on Iran

Federal entrapment snares another dupe and brings hundreds of millions to the brink of war.

"...it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.)

This suggests that this option might benefit from being held in abeyance until such time as the Iranians made an appropriately provocative move, as they do from time to time. In that case, it would be less a determined policy to employ airstrikes and instead more of an opportunistic hope that Iran would provide the United States with the kind of provocation that would justify airstrikes. However, that would mean that the use of airstrikes could not be the primary U.S. policy toward Iran (even if it were Washington’s fervent preference), but merely an ancillary contingency to another option that would be the primary policy unless and until Iran provided the necessary pretext." -page 84-85 of "Which Path to Persia?" Brookings Institution, 2009.

Apparently, manufacturing such a "necessary pretext" to unilaterally bomb a nation of 70 million is now also a part of US foreign policy toward Iran.

An oafish fabrication announced this week by Attorney General Eric Holder, consisted of an Iranian-American used-car salesman that "allegedly" attempted to hire an undercover US DEA agent, posing as a Mexican Los Zetas gangster, to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would add "nobody could make that up, right?" Wrong.

The Fortune 500-funded US policy think-tank, Brookings Institution, in 2009 made it quite clear that the US would pursue its interests across the Middle East and would not tolerate a strong, assertive Iran standing in the way. Brookings would acknowledge in their report, however, that Iran sought neither to confront the United States militarily, nor desired to provoke the West into attacking the Islamic Republic, and even declared that Iran's nuclear threat was more the deterrence it would present toward future US acts of aggression rather than hyped claims of proliferation or unilateral first-strikes.

Many of the enumerated options explored in the Brookings report for destabilizing and overthrowing the Iranian government had already been in the process of being carried out even before the report was published in 2009. This included funding, arming, and training US State Department-listed foreign terrorist organization (#28 on the list), Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK.) To date, covert support, weapons and funding have already made it into MEK's hands, and select members of the terrorist organization have even received specialized training on US soil. US policy makers, after admitting MEK had the blood of US soldiers and civilians on its hands and that it has "undeniably" conducted terrorist attacks, shockingly wants to remove it from the US foreign terrorist organization list so that it can be worked with more closely in toppling the Iranian government.

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