Source: Global ResearchFinian Cunningham
It’s not just an act of war; it’s a taunt for response
The US covert war against Iran raised the stakes
even higher today with the assassination of yet another nuclear
scientist, with some analysts saying that the Islamic Republic is being
pushed into a corner to either back down in its confrontation with the
US or retaliate – the latter most certainly triggering an all-out war.
Thirty-two-year-old chemical engineer Mostafa Ahmadi
Roshan was inside his small Peugeot car when two assailants on motorbike
rode up alongside and planted a magnetic bomb on his vehicle in the
capital, Tehran. The scientist was killed instantly by the explosion.
His driver died later from injuries. And elderly bystander was also
killed in the attack.
Roshan was head of technical procurements at Iran’s
first uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. His killing bears all the
hallmarks of a targeted assassination by foreign covert military agents.
Iranian state-owned media and parliamentarians immediately denounced
“Mossad”, “Zionists” and the Western proxy-terrorist group, the
Mujahedine-e Khalq Organisation (MKO), for having a role in the murder.
Such involvement is likely true, but ultimately the
author must have been Washington. None of the groups would dare carry
out this high-profile hit without clearance from handlers in Washington.
Noticeably, Iranian sources shied away from articulating this obvious
conclusion, perhaps realizing the gravity of the consequences.
For the past two years at least it is an open secret
that Washington (along with British MI6, Mossad and local proxies) has
been orchestrating a campaign of terrorist subversion in Iran – the
ultimate aim being to overthrow the 33-year-old Islamic Republic, which
replaced the West’s favourite client, the Shah of Iran in 1979. This is
the real reason for the contrived confrontation over Iran’s nuclear
activities.
Dozens of Iranian scientists, engineers and academics
have either been abducted or assassinated by US-led covert ops. Most of
them have been closely involved in Iran’s nuclear research. Two years
ago, Professor Massoud Ali Mohammed was killed when a booby-trapped
motorcycle exploded outside his home in Tehran. Last year, in an attack
identical to the latest, nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari was murdered
when motorcyclists planted magnetic bombs on his car. Another scientist,
Fereydoun Abbassi, who is now head of Iran’s Atomic Energy
Organisation, was seriously wounded in a simultaneous attack.
On 12 November last year, a massive explosion ripped
through a military installation at Bid Kaneh, near Tehran, killing 17
personnel, including Brigadier Hassan Moghadam who is believed to have
been a senior missile technician. In that attack, there is suspicion
that the explosive payload may have been fired from a CIA aerial drone.
Then two weeks later, another explosion hit a nuclear facility in
Isfahan, Western Iran.
Combined with CIA cyber-attacks on Iranian research
networks and increasing drone incursions into Iranian territory, it is
clear that the cold-blooded murder of the country’s nuclear experts is
part of a deliberate cover campaign of terrorist subversion –
orchestrated by Washington.
The latest assassination in Tehran comes only two
days after an Iranian court sentenced a former US marine to death after
he was convicted of operating in Iran as a CIA spy. That announcement
provoked condemnation from the White House and an irate response in the
American media. A US state department spokeswoman lashed out at the
Iranian regime accusing it of committing routine political abductions of
American citizens.
The details on the convicted man, Amir Mirzae Hekmati
(28) from Flint, Michigan, seem murky. But it appears that he was given
due process since his arrest in August, including access to a lawyer.
He has 20 days to appeal the verdict. It should be noted that three
other American citizens arrested previously in Iran on suspicion of
espionage were eventually released by the Iranian authorities. It has
been mooted that the government in Tehran released those detainees as a
gesture for diplomatic dialogue with the Obama administration. The
rebuff from Washington may have hardened Tehran to push for the full
prosecution in the case of Hekmati.
But the wider context is the concerted efforts by
Washington to overthrow the Islamic Republic’s government headed by
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The sentencing of Hekmati is another
twist in the spiraling tensions between Iran and the US and its Western
allies – tensions that have escalated because of relentless Western
aggression over unsubstantiated claims about Iran’s nuclear programme.
According to Tehran and undisputed by countless UN inspections, Iran’s
nuclear programme is for civilian energy and medical applications and is
legitimately within the provisions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
With tightening US-led sanctions bearing down on
Iran’s Central Bank and oil industry, the naval war of nerves in the
Strait of Hormuz, and the constantly amplified, provocative threats of
pre-emptive military strikes against Iran, it is any wonder that Tehran
needs to show defiance and assert its sovereign rights with regards to
foreign nationals suspected of covert operations.
However, in the climate of hostility, any such move
by Tehran is immediately portrayed as a provocation – just as its
warning was last week over the closing of territorial waters in the
Strait of Hormuz to oil trans-shipments if the West proceeds with
sanctions. If the murder of the Iranian scientist is a US strike over
the sentencing of the alleged CIA spy, then the Iranians are being told
that they have no room for manoeuvre – even when the manoeuvre is
covered by a claim to sovereign rights.
It seems that the near decade-long Western
confrontation with Iran has now shifted gear to an irrevocable vicious
cycle where war is all but inevitable.
The latest murder of a senior Iranian scientist seems
to be a trenchant ultimatum dispatched from Washington to Iran. The
assassination campaign on Iranian territory against its citizens and
scientific experts is not just as an act of war. It is a premeditated
taunt for a response.
Finian Cunningham is Global Research’s Middle East and East Africa correspondent
