CNN reports that Iran is suspected of being behind a recent plot to bomb the Israeli embassy in Bangkok:
The video, shot by a bystander, is horrific. A man lies on a Bangkok street, his legs severed below the knee. He is Saeid Moradi, a 28-year old Iranian, injured on February 14 as he tried to throw a device at police.The circumstantial evidence pointing to Iran is strong, as strong as the circumstantial evidence linking Israel to an earlier assassination in Dubai.
Minutes earlier, an explosion had rocked the house rented by Moradi and two other Iranians in the Sukhumvit Road area of the Thai capital. (Watch one of the suspects take Thai police to the scene of the explosion)
This type of behavior should be condemned for what it is: State acts of terrorism. It is terrorism when Iran commits these atrocities and it is terrorism when Israel does.
Terrorism was a favorite tactic of various communist countries during the 1970s. It was much cheaper than conventional warfare and the difficulty of attribution gave the activities plausible deniability. Reagan funded right wing death squads in Latin America and East Germany funded the Red Army Faction (aka the Baader-Meinhof gang).
The main reason terrorism came to a halt was the collapse of the Soviet system and the end of the cold war. But even during the 1970s it was clear that it was a game both (or rather all) sides could play.
The CIA and KGB stopped targeting each other's operatives for assassination sometime back in the 1950s when it became clear that both sides were prepared to respond in kind. Hopefully the Israeli and Iranian groups will work this out at some point.
Unless of course it turns out that these turn out to be false flag operations.
In August 1980, the train station in Bologna was bombed, killing 85 people. At first the attack was attributed to leftist splinter groups but the investigation soon led to a neo-fascist group with connections to the Italian secret service. The generally accepted theory today is that this was in fact a false flag operation intended to provide the pretext for a fascist takeover, possibly as part of a series of attacks.
