‘Iran plot’ or ‘plot by an Iranian’?

The events leading up to the arrest of the Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar have been dubbed the ‘Iran plot’. He has been charged with the attempted assassination of the Saudi Ambassador to the US, Adel al-Jubeir. It is alleged that the Quds Force, a branch of the Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, was behind this attempted attack. This news item is a good example of how, quite often, the fewer facts with which one is presented, the greater number of facts one is tempted to exaggerate or even invent. From this exaggeration of facts, some commentators have started to make some rather bold claims. Examples of this premature moralising can be seen in the Telegraph, which has called for Obama to ‘act accordingly’, and Kenneth M. Pollack, who claims that Tehran is ‘meaner and nastier than ever’. Rather predictably, there has been a great deal of speculative and inflammatory journalism but no attempt on the part of the US government to mollify these emotive calls for ‘action’. They are doing quite the opposite. Also, as Glenn Greewald has pointed out, the US is ‘keeping everything secret about their accusations, so there’s no reason to doubt what they’re claiming’.

We are yet to find out how far up into the Iranian government this ‘plot’ goes- if at all. Surely, calls for action are highly inappropriate and speak louder about the West’s profound scepticism of Iran than about the truth of this event. We should also be careful not to accuse the US of fabricating the entire thing. We should be patient- let us resist prescriptive journalism until we have been given more detail.