A recent Washington Post article describes Mansour Arbabsiar, the central figure in the alleged assassination plot (via Scoblete):

Within the small Iranian American community in this Gulf Coast city, Arbabsiar, 56, was well known and well liked. But he was also renowned for being almost comically absent-minded, perpetually losing keys, cellphones, briefcases, anything that wasn’t tied down. He failed at a succession of ventures from used cars to kebabs.

He certainly sounds like a natural recruit for a high-stakes assassination attempt, doesn’t he? Even as dubious government claims go, the story about this alleged plot is hard to take seriously. Sponsoring such an amateurish plot doesn’t make much sense. The official U.S. line, conveyed to us by David Ignatius, is not very compelling:

The Iranians are stressed, at home and abroad, in ways that are leading them to engage in riskier behavior.

Ignatius lists the reasons for the “stress,” but none of them mentions any of the attacks that have been taking place inside Iran for the last several years. Via Greenwald, some stories have mentioned the killings of Iranian nuclear scientists as part of an explanation for what might be motivating the alleged plot, but this would be just one part of any plausible explanation. There have been reports on U.S. support for anti-regime militants inside Iran circulating for many years. For example, The Daily Telegraph reported in 2007 on the previous administration’s policy of supporting armed ethnic separatist movements:

In a move that reflects Washington’s growing concern with the failure of diplomatic initiatives, CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran’s border regions.

The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime [bold mine-DL].

In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials.

In late 2009, Selig Harrison detailed Bush-era covert support for Baluch and Kurdish militants:

The result was a compromise: limited covert action carried out by proxy, in the case of the Baluch, through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate or, I.S.I. [bold mine-DL], and in the case of the Kurds by the C.I.A. in cooperation with Israel’s Mossad. My knowledge of the I.S.I.’s role is based on first-hand Pakistani sources, including Baluch leaders. Evidence of the C.I.A. role in providing weapons aid and training to Pejak, the principal Kurdish rebel group in Iran, has been spelled out by three U.S. journalists, Jon Lee Anderson and Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker and Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times, who have interviewed a variety of Pejak leaders.

Within the last year, the Baluch terrorist group Jundullah was still engaging in terrorist attacks inside Iran, and the group was added to the FTO list late last year. PJAK was the Kurdish group targeted by the recent military action undertaken by Iran. The activities of these groups may have nothing to do with the alleged plot, but I find it interesting that no one has bothered mentioning them.