By now everyone is well aware of the alleged Iranian plot to use a Mexican drug gang to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US and blow up the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington.
Numerous observers such as Juan Cole, Glenn Greenwald, Gary Sick, Kevin Katzmann, Julian Borger and others have all done great jobs pointing to the holes in the alleged plot and raising key questions about it. I won't go over those again.
The only point I wish to make here is that the plot is too absurd to be real, but also too absurd to be a deliberate "Gulf of Tonkin"-type fabrication on the part of the US, as some have hinted. It also seems too ridiculous for even a third intelligence agency to have cooked up, though I suppose that's less unlikely.
On the whole though, my suspicion is that this is some kind of investigative cock-up by US law enforcement overly keen to effectively entrap another "terrorist" that the US government has embarrassingly jumped all over. The key questions are where the $100,000 came from (Juan Cole suggests it could have been the key suspect's own money), and how the name of an apparently real but largely unknown Iranian IRGC general came to be involved. I suspect that once the answers to those questions come to light, the plot will be revealed to be a screw-up, or at least a vast overstatement and misinterpretation of the realities of the case.
