“We are not talking to Iran, so we don’t understand each other,” outgoing Joints Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told the Carnie Endowment for International Peace last month. “If something happens, it’s virtually assured that we won’t get it right — that there will be miscalculation which could be extremely dangerous in that part of the world.”
Mullen’s warning of the perils arising from the two sides inability to communicate and understand each other’s intentions — “even in the darkest days of the Cold War, we had links to the Soviet Union” — seems especially prescient amid the fallout from the alleged plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador to Washington blamed by the U.S. on “elements of the Iranian government”. Claims that officials within the elite Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps initiated a bizarre scheme, via an Iranian-American used car salesman — described by his former business partner as “a sort of hustler” — to enlist the services of a Mexican drug gang for a terror strike in the U.S. capital, have been seized on by the Administration press for tougher international action against Tehran. (See “Iran’s Alleged Assassination Plot and Its Political Fallout.”)
“We see this as a chance to go out to capitals and around the wrold and talk to allies and partners about what the Iranians tried to do,” an unnamed official told the Washington Post. “We’re going to use this to isolate them to the maximum extent possible.” Vice President Joe Biden added, darkly, that when it came to responding to Iran’s behavior, “Nothing has been taken off the table.”
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