• A long pattern of brazen assassination  - Nawaf Obaid
The murder conspiracy was undoubtedly an effort to reestablish the credibility of Iran's hard-line clerics.

• Those 'crazy' Iranians  - Mark Perry
This might be as laughable as a Mexican invasion of Texas, if it weren't so damned dangerous.

• Iran and the new Arab world  - Muthanna al-Qadi
The purported plot to kill the ambassador throws light on a hidden war between rivals.

• A proxy war between Iran and the US  - Sadegh Zibakalam
During the past 32 years, there has been only one Iranian leader whom the Saudis trusted: Rafsanjani.

A long pattern of brazen assassination
 Nawaf Obaid

Since news of the Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States became public, many have reacted with disbelief, unable to comprehend why the Iranian regime would seek to carry out such an attack. However, the evidence against indicted co-conspirators Mansour Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri is overwhelming. And if one looks at Iran's record of covert operations, it is clear that this latest scheme fits the Islamic Republic's modus operandi.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iran's leadership has been linked to several murderous plots against Saudi diplomats. These have almost always come on the heels of Iranian foreign policy setbacks and can best be seen as attempts to regain momentum in difficult circumstances. Thus, in the aftermath of Iran's failed plan this spring to install an Islamist Shiite puppet regime in Bahrain, history suggests that some desperate act of sabotage was likely to follow.

The Tehran government's strategy of targeted assassinations began at the end of the 1980s, a tumultuous decade for Iran. It fought a war of attrition with Iraq, but gained no territory. Its main objective to export its Islamic revolution to neighboring countries failed miserably. Faced with these strategic losses, it resorted to murder and terror.

In 1988, with the support of the Khomeini regime, angry mobs breached the walls of the Saudi embassy in Tehran and destroyed the premises. Several diplomats were badly beaten and the Saudi charge d'affaires leapt to his death in an effort to escape the fate he would have suffered at the hands of these thugs. That same year, Iranian proxies assassinated a Saudi diplomat in Istanbul. According to United States intelligence, the killing was most likely carried out by militants linked to Hizballah al-Hijaz, an Iranian-backed group that would later mastermind the deadly Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American soldiers. The next year, the same group was linked to the murder of Saleh al-Maliki, a third secretary at the Saudi Embassy in Thailand who was gunned down on a central street in Bangkok.

More recently, Iran has carried out killings through its Lebanese proxy Hizballah. In 2005, according to indictments from the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon, Hizballah operatives detonated explosives near the convoy of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, killing him and 22 others. Like its previous assassination attempts, Iran's move against Hariri was a reaction to policy failures in the region. Hariri had special ties with the Saudi leadership and had called for a UN resolution mandating that Syria withdraw its forces from the country. Because Syria was Iran's only Arab ally, however, the end of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon would have greatly reduced Iranian influence in the country. Therefore, the Hariri murder can best be interpreted as a case of Iran lashing out under pressure.

By the same token, Hizballah has also sought to target Saudi diplomats directly. The former Saudi ambassador to Lebanon, Abdulaziz Khoja, was forced to flee on two occasions after Shiite militants targeted him in four failed assassination plots. The militants were linked to Hizballah and Amal, another militant Shiite movement that draws direct support from the Syrian regime.

Just months before the foiled Washington DC plot, the fingerprints of Iran's leadership could be found on the murder of a Saudi diplomat in Pakistan. In May of 2011, Hassan al-Qahtani, the security advisor at the Saudi consulate in Karachi, was killed outside his office in a drive-by shooting. Pakistani intelligence suggested that the gunmen belonged to a Pakistani Shiite dissident group known as Sapih Mohammed, with close ties to a certain Iranian general. Based on messages between members of the group and several Iranian officers, Pakistani officials believe that Iran's intelligence ministry, Vavak, played a major logistics role in the attack.

Here too, the context helps explain the plot's timing. By May, it had become clear that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's attempt to overthrow Bahrain's monarchy and replace it with a radical Shiite clerical government had failed. With this failure, Iran's dream of creating a network of theocratic proxy states across the Arab world's so-called "Shiite crescent" suffered a critical setback. Targeting key Saudi diplomats in Pakistan was simply an attempt to regain momentum after another major policy failure.

The common operational thread in these plots has been a highly secretive "Saudi Arabia Actions Cell" within the Quds Force, the special operations branch of the Revolutionary Guards. The cell was founded by Ahmed Sharifi, a now retired Guards general who orchestrated the Khobar Tower bombings in 1996 and has been implicated in virtually all the recent assassination attempts against Saudi diplomats.

Given this history, the recently-foiled plot should not surprise anyone. A dramatic attack against a key Saudi diplomat in the heart of the US would have sent a powerful message to domestic and international opponents. The murder conspiracy was undoubtedly an effort to reestablish the credibility of Iran's hard-line clerics and to demonstrate that, in spite of its recent failures in Bahrain, Yemen and now Syria, it still has the capability to project power.

Those who dismiss the allegations against Iran on the grounds that they are simply too "bizarre" to be true show a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of Iran's covert operations. This latest plot is only one episode in a long pattern of brazen sabotage and assassination.-Published 24/11/2011 © bitterlemons-international.org

Nawaf Obaid is senior fellow at King Faisal Center for Research & Islamic Studies in Riyadh.

Arthur Zimmermann was really quite a clever man. A lifelong diplomat and professional scowler (he was Prussian, after all), Zimmermann served as Germany's state secretary for foreign affairs during World War I--and was known for concocting outlandish international plots that (he hoped) would deliver victory. He conspired with Russian communists to overthrow the czar, urged Irish revolutionaries to attack the British, and plotted with Indian radicals to subvert "the Raj". Some of this worked (he shipped Lenin back to Petrograd), but a lot of it didn't: Irish rebel Roger Casement was hung when he returned from Berlin and the "Hindu-German Conspiracy" was ruthlessly crushed. Alas.

But Arthur had a zanier side. In 1917, he sent a telegram to the German ambassador in Mexico instructing him to make an offer to the Mexican government, to wit: if America were to enter the war on the side of the British, Zimmermann said, Germany would support an expedition to reconquer Mexico's lost territories of Texas and Arizona. This was rich stuff for the British, who intercepted the telegram and gleefully (their soldiers were dying just then, in windrows, along the Somme) passed it on to the Americans. The Americans were "enraged", used the telegram as proof of German "perfidy" and, after the Germans started blowing holes in passenger ships, dispatched an expeditionary force to France to make the world safe for democracy. How'd that work out?

The Zimmermann Telegram has gone down in history as a major diplomatic pratfall, despite Zimmermann's protest that his proposal (the Mexicans, smartly, scurried away), was merely intended to lay out a possible option should America actually enter the war. He should have known better--for what seems like a good idea to diplomats at the time can have unforeseen, long-term and even bloody consequences, viz. Lenin. Which is only to say that, no matter how improbable, it's not out of the question that the Iranian government recruited a used car salesman to plot the assassination of the Saudi ambassador to the US--with a Mexican drug cartel as a shadowy intermediary. After all, and manifestly, crazier things have happened.

Still, you have to wonder. The plot comes at a particularly auspicious time for the White House, which is scrambling to mend America's frayed relationship with the Saudis at the same time that it hugs Israel. The United States has been delicately squaring this circle for 60 years--and has learned there's no better way to do it than by identifying an enemy common to both. It used to be the Godless Bolsheviks, now it's the God-addled "mullahs". Then too, this is an easy sell to the American people, a disturbingly large number of whom believe their birthright is threatened by Iran-controlled Hamas conspirators whose goal (get this) is to impose "sharia law" on an unsuspecting public. If we're not careful, we'll all wake up Muslim.

In truth, there's nothing new here. A cursory survey of my country's history reveals serial fears that unnamed creeps are always "infiltrating" from Mexico (they never seem to come from Canada, for some reason), in order to gnaw away at our values, plant bombs or subvert our freedoms. Sadly, the response to these threats is also predictable, with our tireless law enforcement and intelligence agencies leaving no stone (or pebble, as the case may be) unturned: the Federal Bureau of Investigations looks into critics of Israel in North Carolina, grand juries are called to intimidate anti-war activists in Chicago, the police arrest 17-year-old Somalis in Minneapolis, and our intelligence agencies track grifters who claim to be working for unnamed Iranians.

This might be as laughable as a Mexican invasion of Texas, if it weren't so damned dangerous. The talisman of just how perilous this has become was evident just this week, during a debate among Republican candidates for the presidency--all of whom (excepting one), think it would not only be just dandy if Israel attacked Iran, but even better if we helped them. One of them, Newt Gingrich (he's the smart one, we're told), even argued that the US should support an Israeli conventional attack on Iran because if we don't then Israel will feel "abandoned"--and use "multiple nuclear weapons" to eliminate the Iranian threat. This startling, er . . . position passed without comment, apparently because the idea that Israel might actually be blackmailing us is somehow viewed as just okay. So here we are: our unshakable, unbreakable and unquestioned support for Israel is not predicated on shared values, but on the belief that they might be as crazy as the guys who hired a failed used car salesman to assassinate a Saudi ambassador with a non-existent pipe bomb. And you thought Zimmermann was loony.-Published 24/11/2011 © bitterlemons-international.org

Mark Perry is an author and foreign policy, military and intelligence analyst based in Washington, DC.

The news of an alleged assassination attempt on the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, in October read like a first-class movie script, but the manner in which government political elites dealt with the incident signaled that Washington and other European capitals did not see the matter as a joke.

Despite the story's seemingly simple formulation noted even in the American press, and the surprising use of Mexicans, Iranians, and members of organized crime to carry out a political assassination, the collection of evidence--if it is proved to be correct--points to Tehran.

The purported plot to kill the ambassador throws light on a hidden war between rivals. Unrest broke out just weeks ago in the Awamiya region of eastern Saudi Arabia, which has a Shiite majority. Saudi officials charged that the protests were driven by "the hands of outsiders", and said the perpetrators of the violence were loyal to a "foreign country", an oblique reference to Tehran.

Iran understands the importance of the prestige accumulated by Saudi Arabia--its political, economic and religious stature for Muslims--which makes it the front line in expanding Persian influence. Iran always highlights the kingdom as the most important player among its Middle East adversaries, and sees the kingdom as the largest obstacle confronting the Islamic Republic--the world's only Shiite state--in fulfilling its role as the guardian of Shiite Arabs, especially those in the Gulf.

Without a doubt, Iran has found in the "Arab spring" a golden opportunity to strengthen its foothold in countries where it has struggled for more than 30 years to "export the Shiite revolution". It does not seem a coincidence that Iran is targeting countries surrounding Saudi Arabia geographically (Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, Iraq, the Gulf states, and Yemen), thereby exploiting Arab revolutions to implement its agenda for acquiring the resources of the region.

The Gulf "shield"--Saudi Arabia was very firm in this regard--was intended to send troops to Bahrain to quell protests, deter the risk of revolutionary fever in the street and give a clear message to the neighborhood that it will not allow anyone to interfere in the security of the region. Saudi Arabia also did not hesitate in supporting Yemen's president and his military against Houthi Shiite dissidents.

In the same context, Riyadh has quietly supported armed groups in Lebanon to address the unique status of Hizballah in the Lebanese arena, a role confirmed by secret US telegrams disclosed by Wikileaks. Here, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal was reported to have proposed an "Arab force" in Lebanon backed by the West to rein in Hizballah after it seized parts of Beirut in 2008 and to prevent Iranian hegemony in Lebanon in addition to its alliances in Iraq and Gaza.

Saudi Arabia is also taking advantage of the disturbances underway in Syria, which prompted Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz to issue a strongly-worded statement in August against President Bashar Assad, asking him to "stop the bloodshed", and then to remove the Saudi ambassador from Syria. These moves reflect a shift in Saudi policy towards Syria.

It is difficult for Riyadh to contain what it perceives as the "Shiite octopus ", but without a doubt the kingdom will benefit from the fall of the Assad regime and an alliance with its new--likely Sunni--leadership, thus closing the gate through Damascus to the Arab world that Iran has used to achieve its objectives in the Middle East.

Amid all this tension, international forces continue in their constant quest to impose further sanctions on Iran and complete its political and economic isolation. Tehran itself suffers from internal problems, of which its fatal weakness may be the ongoing conflict within the ruling regime that is evolving into a conflict inside one wing of strict conservatives between the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Furthermore, the non-Persian peoples' struggle to lift themselves out of tyranny into freedom and independence is viewed by some as a broad base from which to break up Iran into nation-states similar to the former Soviet Union. Washington is trying hard to portray the Islamic Republic as an imminent rising danger in the region, recently selling Saudi Arabia an arsenal of weapons worth billions of dollars. The deteriorating economic situation weakens Iran in the face of additional crises.

This is what Khamenei referred to in a recent meeting with members of the Iranian government, warning that the economic situation is the most important vulnerability faced by Iranian society. International statistics indicate that the Iranian economy did not grow last year and experts predict zero percent growth in the current year.

Returning to the assassination plot, decision-makers await the results of the investigation. The United Nations General Assembly resolution passed last week against Iran and its "conspiracy" to assassinate the Saudi ambassador was criticized by China and Russia--Iran's strategic ally--for lacking any legal basis.

Western capitals are taking the opportunity to condemn Iran for trying to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, accusing it of "exporting instability" in the region. Most recently, Iran was accused of supplying former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi with chemical weapons. Not to mention the world's stand blocking Tehran's ambitions to expand its disputed nuclear program. This comes at the instigation of Israel, which has not stopped beating the drums of a new war in the region that would target Iran's nuclear plans and delay them a few years.

It seems that Saudi Arabia has adopted the US solution in dealing with the crisis, officially asking Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon to inform the UN Security Council of the "heinous conspiracy" against the Saudi ambassador in Washington and explicitly accusing Iran of being behind the plot.


As the "new Arab nation" is born, Iran is not going to cease its attempts to interfere in this revolutionary fervor and will remain a source of concern for Arab regimes. On its face, this will appear as sectarian conflict, but in reality it is a deep regional political divide.- Published 24/11/2011 © bitterlemons-international.org

Muthanna al-Qadi is editor of Middle East affairs at Al-Quds daily newspaper based in London.

Even before the Americans accused Iran of a plot to assassinate a Saudi diplomat in the United States, relations between Tehran and Riyadh were at a low. Needless to say, the accusation only deepened the animosity between these two staunch Islamic states.

Iranian officials as well as the state-run media flatly denied the assassination story and dismissed it as a "third rate Hollywood motion picture scenario". The Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson asked, "Why would Iran want to go to the trouble of arranging a clumsy plot to assassinate an unimportant Saudi diplomat?" A leading hard-line newspaper close to government circles wrote, "This world is full of countries in which we could have carried out such a plot if for any reason we had desired to do so. Why should we have chosen the US capital where we don't enjoy any privileges and have no bases to operate?"

The Iranian speaker of parliament stated that by fabricating such a "foolish and amateurish" story, US leaders wanted to divert world public attention away from the "Wall Street movement crisis and rebellion". Another Iranian leader commented that the US was trying to cover its disastrous departure from Iraq by fabricating this "bizarre story".

Initially, Iranian leaders did not refer to the Saudis. However, as Riyadh became increasingly angry over Iran's alleged involvement and pressed Tehran for "explanations", the Iranian media also changed its tune. One after another, Iranian leaders reminded the Saudis of their involvement in brutally suppressing the innocent Bahraini Shiites.

To be sure, relations between the two states have not been cordial since the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. The Iranian leadership regards the Saudis as cronies of the US in the region and has no respect for them. The Saudis in turn regard the Islamic regime as a troublemaker lurking behind every radical and anti-Saudi movement in the region.

During the past 32 years, there has been only one Iranian leader whom the Saudis trusted: Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Relations between the two states improved remarkably during his presidency (1989-1997). Hashemi Rafsanjani managed even to influence relations between Tehran and Riyadh during President Mohammad Khatami's term of office. But since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005 and the hardliners pushed Hashemi Rafsanjani and the reformists aside, relations with Riyadh have reverted to the bad old days of the first decades of the Islamic Revolution.

Many observers regard religious differences between Iran and Saudi Arabia as the core cause of the deep tensions between them. They are wrong. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are as Sunni as the Saudi leaders, yet both are strategic allies of Islamic Iran. The conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia is in fact a proxy war between Iran and the US, whereby Iran and the US/Saudi Arabia are at odds with one another literally in every country and regarding every dispute in the region.

Tehran strongly supports the Iraqi government whereas Saudi relations with Baghdad are very cold. Iran supports Hamas and the other radical Palestinian groups whereas the Saudis support President Mahmoud Abbas and the moderates. Iran supports Hizballah while the Saudis support its enemies. Iran strongly backs President Bashar Assad's regime in Syria while Riyadh supports moves to overthrow him. Throughout the Arab world, Iran openly supports radical Islamists who tend to be anti-western, while the Saudis are more inclined towards the moderate currents.

Even in Afghanistan they have their differences. Once again, the Saudis tend to support moderate groups there while Tehran is inclined more towards the radicals. In the Persian Gulf region, Riyadh is looked upon as an ally by the Gulf states while Iran is regarded as a potential threat.

Ironically, even regarding the Hajj annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Iran and Saudi Arabia have sharp differences. The latter believes the Hajj is a purely spiritual and religious affair while the former regards the Hajj as both "religious and political". During the Hajj ceremony, thousands of Iranian pilgrims take part in a huge rally that calls for "death to the US and death to Israel" as well as to the other "satans". The Saudis oppose the rally as an un-Islamic act. In 1987, a struggle erupted when Saudi military police attacked Iranian pilgrims in order to break up their rally in the holy city of Mecca; more than 400 Iranian pilgrims were shot to death and more than 1,000, including many women, were injured by the Saudi National Guard. Nevertheless, Iranian pilgrims have continued to hold the so-called anti-US rally every year.

It is difficult if not impossible to envisage how relations between the two countries could ever improve. The alleged assassination plot emerged against more than three decades of political animosity between them. Without a fundamental transformation of relations between Iran and the US, any hope of changing the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia is unrealistic.-Published 24/11/2011 © bitterlemons-international.org

Sadegh Zibakalam is professor of political science at Tehran University.