Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like that with the alleged assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador, war with Iran just got a lot closer to reality.

Not necessarily war between the U.S. and Iran alone. But a war involving Iran. TAC’s Philip Giraldi, a retired CIA agent, writes:

The National Security Council is currently meeting with Vice President Joe Biden present to consider taking dramatic steps against Iran following the discovery that Quds, the covert operations arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, was attempting to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in the U.S. Biden is on record as saying that “all options” are on the table.

From the analysis I’ve read, most people are willing to believe this plot is for real, though people are careful to say “alleged” — not, I’m betting, so much out of legalistic politesse as fear of the potential consequences if this plot is for real. James Kitfield gets to the heart of the matter:

The de facto U.S. strategy of containing an Iran on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons may have just gotten a lot more dangerous.  … A Tehran willing to engage in such high-risk behavior defies the “rationale actor” presumption that lies at the heart of nuclear deterrence. In Washington, Riyadh, and Jerusalem, governments are reconsidering their Iranian strategies and recalibrating their “acceptable risk” calculations relating to Iran’s nuclear program.

“State-sponsored terrorism is not new territory for Iran, which in the past has been guilty of assassinating Iranian dissidents in Europe and directing terrorist bombings in Argentina in the 1990s and against U.S. forces in Lebanon in the early 1980s,” said Brian Michael Jenkins, a longtime terrorist expert at the RAND Corporation. “But if the Quds Force is truly behind this latest plot, it has raised the stakes into a totally different category by plotting attacks on U.S. soil. An Iranian government that is willing to take that kind of risk is pretty close to reckless, and that raises serious questions about how they would act with nuclear weapons.”

Many who have opposed war with Iran have done so in the (correct) view that it would be far, far more potentially destructive to American interests than the Iraq War, which, by the way, has left us in a much weaker position to attack Iran than we otherwise would have been. And they’ve argued that a nuclear Iran could be deterred. If — if — this plot really is connectible to the government of Iran, then those opposing war with Iran (and I am among them) are in a more difficult position.

I should say emphatically that war with Iran would be a disaster for the US. I find it very difficult to imagine a situation in which it would be worth undertaking, given current realities. We should be extremely cautious here. Even if this is the work of the Quds force, it is important not to overreact. Kitfield again:

Robert Baer is a counterterrorism and Iran expert formerly with the CIA. “The Quds Force has never been this sloppy, using untested proxies, contracting with Mexican drug cartels, sending money through New York bank accounts, and putting its agents on U.S. soil where they risk being caught. It reads more like a Hollywood script than an actual Quds plot,” he said in an interview. “I’m sure the administration is acting on solid evidence, and possibly this is the work of some rogue element of the Quds Force that for some reason is intent on embarrassing Tehran. But something doesn’t add up. The Quds Force is simply better than this.”

Joe Klein agrees that this is bizarre behavior by the Iranians, if true, but it could have a certain rationality behind it, vis-a-vis internal Iranian politics:

But it would be careless to merely write this off as a rogue Quds element gone berserk. Something else is happening here: Iran’s economy and alliances are failing simultaneously. The economic sanctions, imposed by the United Nations, haven’t brought the regime to its knees. But the country, and especially Iran’s powerful business community, is clearly suffering. Worse, Iran’s most important ally in the region, Syria, has become an international pariah and is on the verge of collapse.

Seems to me that there’s less chance of the US becoming involved in a Mideast war with Iran than there is of Saudi Arabia and Israel (!) colluding on some kind of military response to Iran’s provocation. In 2006, I was at a conference in Dubai, and sat at a dinner table with a group of Saudi elites (I don’t think any of them were in the government). I was stunned by how palpably afraid they were of Iran and its influence. Even if the US somehow stayed out of a wider regional war between Sunnis and Shia, involving Israel too, it hardly needs pointing out what a catastrophe the destruction of oil fields and (at best) the disruption of the oil flow will be for the depressed world economy.

UPDATE: Steve Clemons agrees that this is a weird operation by Iran, but ponders the crazy sense it might make to the Iranians.