War-making as farce

Okay, so if this Iranian plot to blow up a Washington restaurant ‘reads like the pages of a Hollywood script,’ as stated by FBI Director Robert Mueller, under the walk-like-a-duck-sound-like-a-duck principle, it in fact is from the pages of a Hollywood script. Except that in Hollywood they sometimes write more believable screenplays.

Turns out that the main suspect, Mansour Arbabsiar, may have suffered brain damage in a near-fatal knife attack, was ‘comically absent-minded’ and generally incompetent in all his personal and commercial endeavors. This Washington Post background article quotes locals in Corpus Christi describing him as ‘goofy’, notes that he had a recent narcotics arrest and was nicknamed ‘Jack’ because he liked Jack Daniels bourbon a lot. He had failed at the restaurant business, a finance company and used car sales, and his second wife recently dumped him.

In short, Arbabsiar is a complete screw-up, and the idea that a sophisticated intelligence agency planning an audacious assassination in the middle of Washington, DC, would hire this bozo is side-splittingly unbelievable.

The guy who helped Arbabsiar cook up the plot is described as a Mexican drug dealer who was let off in exchange for cooperation. Well, he brought them the goods, so now he’s probably free to go rejoin the Zetas and hang journalists from highway overpasses with their guts hanging out. Nice partners Obama has teamed up with for this operation.

Obama and Hillary C obviously needed something to goose their campaign against Iran a little, but they should be ashamed of themselves for settling on this pathetic charade, which is already falling apart. With a few more details of this farce, the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment is going to become a laughing-stock.

But even more disturbing is the possibility that credibility is not a high priority for the Obama pranksters. They may simply be trying to whip up nationalistic spirit to boost their unsuccessful campaign to get the Iranians into doing their bidding. Careful, though: irrational fervor can quickly slip out of control of the happy demagogue who launches it. Obama wouldn’t be the first head of state to get himself boxed into a war he didn’t mean to launch but found himself powerless to stop.