More on Iran being stupid

Yesterday I wrote about how the Iran plot makes the Iranian government appear pretty stupid. Tim Padgett at Time has the exact same argument, though for different reasons.

If Iranian government operatives really did try to contract a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., as the Obama Administration alleges today, then they weren't just being diabolical. They were being fairly stupid.

...

Had Arbabsiar actually been dealing with the Zetas – and not a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informant who posed as a Zeta operative – they probably would have conveyed that reality to him fairly quickly. And they would have likely dismissed the $1.5 million that Arbabsiar allegedly offered the D.E.A. informant. The Zetas, after all, are part of a Mexican drug-trafficking, kidnapping and extortion industry that rakes in as much as $40 billion a year. To risk that kind of cash flow by carrying out a five-alarm international hit for a million and a half bucks seems a non-starter. It also seems an organization like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, for whom the Justice Department says Arbabsiar may have been working, should know better. Arbabsiar, who lives near Mexico in Corpus Christi, Texas, certainly should have been wiser.



I just keep feeling like there is something I'm missing here. From basically every angle, from Mexico to Argentina to the United States to the Middle East, this operation makes no sense for Iran, the government of which has not generally shown irrational behavior. Aggressive, yes. Irrational, no. All of the soft diplomatic balancing Iran was carefully doing in Latin America would also be undone in one stroke for what appears to be no gain.