http://www.examiner.com/x-14373-Progressive-Geopolitics-Examiner~y2009m12d9-Iran-loses-a-scientist-and-plays-the-victim

Iran is charging Saudi Arabia with working with U.S. intelligence in the kidnapping of Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri while the man was on the Hajj. The Iranian parliament speaker accused the U.S. government of acting like a “terrorist.”

If it weren’t potentially tragic, it would be funny. Andrew E. Mathis

Let’s call a spade a spade her. Iran is an international sponsor of terrorism, with the beneficiaries of its largesse including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Gaza Strip’s Hamas. Iran terrorizes its own population on a daily basis, with the near daily violence since the rigged re-election of Lunatic-in-Chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being only the most recent string.

So Iran calling other nations “terrorists” does kind of ring hollow.

This isn’t to say that the U.S. doesn’t sponsor terrorism. Of course it has and probably continues to do so. That’s not under debate. What’s at issue here is whether Iran really occupied some kind of moral high ground that enables it to level such charges.

The other part of the issue raised here is Iran bringing Saudi Arabia into the dispute. By doing so, it continues its positioning against the Saudis as the leading of the Muslim world, a topic about which I wrote about several weeks ago.

Iran is probably on some level banking on general Arab and Muslim loathing of the Saudi royal family in accusing Saudi Arabia of this “kidnapping.” If the Iranian government can make the Saudis look complicit in “terrorism,” then they can further disparage Saudi Arabia and have the fundamentalist Muslim world look more toward Teheran than Riyadh.

The problem here is that Saudi Arabia, while ostensibly an American ally, doesn’t really act like one. While, on the one hand, the Saudi royal family comes to Washington and plays nice with American presidents, they also fund terrorist groups of their own, including al-Qaida. The terrorism done by al-Qaida makes Hezbollah and Hamas look like pikers by comparison.

Will the latest ploy by Iran work? Probably not. The divisions between Iran and the Arab world are more ethnic than religious, and as much as he may position himself as a Muslim leader, Ahmadinejad will never be an Arab, nor does he probably want to be, given the shabby way that Arabs are treated in Iran.

There is a potentially dangerous angle here as well. Iran has been basically daring the United States, Israel, or some coalition of Arab forces to attack it on the basis of its alleged nuclear weapons program. Accusing the U.S. and Saudi Arabia of kidnapping a scientist perhaps involved in this program would be a good way of keeping the issue at the fore.

However, the likelier case is that Amiri blew the whistle on whatever nuclear program Iran is really carrying out. Iran either took Amiri out themselves or Amiri went to the U.S., Saudis, or both and asked for protection — and received it.

For Amiri’s sake, I hope the latter case is the true one.