Bungled in Bangkok

Hi everyone!

Not for the first time I'm trying to get my head around just what the heck is going on with Iran. The past two days have seen terrorist attacks--albeit relatively minor--that bear all the signs of Iranian backing. On Monday, members of Israel's diplomatic community were targeted in both Delhi and Tbilisi. The attack in India was on a car carrying Tal Yehoshua-Koren, the wife of an Israeli diplomat on her way to pick up her children from school. Eyewitnesses said that an unidentified man on a motorcycle pulled up alongside her car and attached an explosive device to it before speeding off. In Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, explosives were discovered near the Israeli Embassy and safely neutralized before detonation.

Yesterday bore witness to a series of explosions in a residential neighborhood in Bangkok that led Thai authorities to uncover a collection of bombs and capture two men--both of whom identified as Iranian--trying to shoot and grenade their way to safety. A third man--also Iranian--tossed two hand grenades at a taxi that refused his fare, thereby blowing off his legs and injuring several passersby. One of the men was detained at the international airport while the other still remains at large.

Iran denied responsibility for Monday's attacks and remained conspicuously silent when questioned about yesterday's rather bungled efforts in Bangkok. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said there was no ambiguity whatsoever as to who was responsible for these terrorist actions: "The attempted terrorist attack in Bangkok proves once again that Iran and its proxies continue to perpetuate terrorism," he said.

Yitzhak Aharonovitch, Israel's public security minister, went further in his statement: "We know who carried out the terror attacks, we know who sent them, and Israel will settle the score with them."

So again I ask the question, what the heck is Iran doing?

It would seem that Iran is deliberately provoking Israel to follow through on its threat to bomb Iran's nuclear processing facilities. The question is why. There's little doubt that an Israeli military strike on Iran would deal a serious (though probably temporary) setback to Iran's nuclear weapons aspirations. Surely, Iran is cognizant of this. But does Iran possibly have something more nefarious up the ayatollahs' deep sleeves? This is an election year for Iran, the first since the widely disputed presidential election in 2009 that saw thousands of Iranians take to the streets in an aborted precursor of 2011's Arab Spring. Protesters took the the streets of Tehran yesterday in limited numbers and were largely unhindered by police, though there were reports of arrests and tear gas.

Could Iran be deliberately goading Israel into an attack that Ahmedinajad and the Ayatollahs could then use as a rallying cry to unite the Iranian people under the banner of patriotism and thereby deflect attention away from corruption at the polling centers come March? It's an interesting theory and one that Israel (and its allies in the West) should consider when weighing the pros and cons of targeted military retaliation.

It's like a game of chess between two masterful opponents. Who can out-strategize or dupe the other into a checkmate scenario? Hopefully, it won't be Iran.

Ciao.