Iran took chance in turning tide

WHEN US Attorney-General Eric Holder announced during a press conference last week that the FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency had thwarted a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US (via a bomb in a Washington DC restaurant), he blamed "factions in the Iran government" for authorising the attacks.

Since then, a strange but entirely predictable ballet has begun among pundits. Nobody is willing to point the finger of blame at Iran's top dog, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

A Newsday editorial on Thursday, for example, noted that: "President Barack Obama must determine whether the conspiracy's leaders are top Iranian officials, religious leaders or a rogue faction within the Qods Force, a shadowy arm of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard."

This is not a lonely view. Julian Borger, a seasoned observer of Iran affairs writing with The Guardian, opined that: "It appears very unlikely that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would approve such a brazen plot with such unpredictable consequences, in effect going to war with Iran's three greatest enemies - Saudi Arabia, the US and Israel at the same time."

One explanation, for Borger, is that "this is a rogue operation, perhaps organised by a faction inside the QF, without the Supreme Leader's blessing. There is an argument it suited the purposes of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who recently lost a bloodless power struggle with Khamenei."

But Tabassum Zakaria and Mark Hosenball at Reuters quoted government sources, indicating it was not clear how high it went, and suggesting Ahmadinejad was the one left in the dark.

All this misses the point. Iran is not Afghanistan before 2001, with warlords and anarchy reigning over its territory. And it is not a country where secret services can launch an operation of such magnitude and potential fallout without approval from above.

The Qods Forces are a branch of the Islamic Revolution's Praetorian Guard and are bound to the Supreme Leader by an oath of loyalty. They respond to the leader's orders, and do not take such daring initiatives to undermine him.

So why did Iran choose to escalate its decades-long confrontation with the US in such a way? And why, as Borger says, should Iran risk starting a war against Israel and Saudi Arabia too?

There are good reasons why decision-makers in Tehran may have chosen to take such a risk. In their view - one also voiced by Iranian politicians, clerics and military commanders - US influence in the region is waning.

Iran has weathered the domestic storm of the Green Movement - and the US failed to come to the rescue of the beleaguered opposition. As the Arab Spring swept away Egypt's and Tunisia's rulers, the US unceremoniously threw its decades-old allies under the bus.

Then, when popular revolt challenged Damascus - a proxy of Iran - it became clear to Iran's leaders that the US had only the strength to offer rhetorical succour to Syria's rebels.

In Libya, the US put steel and treasure to topple a tyrant who may now be supplanted by Islamic forces. The tides are changing in the Middle East, and Iran sees change as playing in its favour.

From Tehran, the US looks weak, its influence declining and its resolve lacking to put up a fight.

What of Israel and Saudi Arabia? Israel is a country the ayatollahs both fear and loathe. They loathe it for religious and ideological reasons; and they fear it because they know that Israel, unlike the US under the present circumstances, would use force to defend its own vital interests.

But they have reasons to believe that Israel has been straightjacketed by the Arab Spring - Israel's deterrence was weakened and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt may herald a new era, where Israel is no longer safe on any of its borders.

Iran may be wrong, but it looks to the Levant and sees the rope tightening against Israel's neck. Besides, it owes Israel a revenge for the assassination of one of its favoured sons - Hezbollah's terrorist mastermind Imad Moughniye. Blowing up an Israeli embassy is one way of doing it.

With the Saudis, there is a long story of animosity, exacerbated by recent Saudi intervention in Bahrain. To kill a prominent Saudi in the heart of Washington serves two purposes - to harm Saudi Arabia and test the US commitment to Saudi Arabia.

In short, this is a risky business, but a calculated one. The plot's perpetrators may be rogue, but that is only because Iran is a rogue regime, not because this was an act of entrepreneurship by a loose cannonball inside the system.

And the fact that right now in Washington, both pundits and government officials seem bent on finding ways to exculpate Iran's top leadership by suggesting the rogue theory of responsibility, indicates Iran's reading of America's weakness may be spot on.

Emanuele Ottolenghi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies and the author of The Pasdaran: Inside Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps