Saudi Emabssy In Washington, DC

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Saudi Emabssy In Washington, DC

The United States took on Thursday the assassination plot against Saudi envoy case to the United Nations, presenting it in hopes to obtain serious condemnation of the regime as an outlaw state and renewed sanctions imposed against it. The Obama administration aims at isolating the regime in Tehran diplomatically, obtaining the application of multiple sanctions against it and possibly other actions. To that purpose the American authorities began the work of convincing the global organization of the danger Iran poses.

Thus, Vice President Joe Biden denounced the assassination attempt against Adel al-Jubeir as “outrageous,” while US State Secretary Hillary Clinton demanded that the Asian country be held responsible for the “violation of international and U.S. law.”

Deputy Secretary of State William Burns invited 100 foreign diplomats in the capital for a meeting at the State Department, where he is expected to present them the case.

The US ambassador to the United States Susan Rice, along with officials from the FBI, CIA and Justice and State Departments, briefed the United Nations Security Council members on the case.

The Iranian ambassador to the United Nations told the international press that the case presented by the Americans was a “big lie,” and accused the United States of setting a dangerous precedent in accusing a state of something it hasn’t done.

The foreign ministry in Tehran called the Swiss ambassador who is representing the interests of the United States in this country and demanded him details of the plot against the Saudi envoy, and about the alleged Iranian implication.

Analysts believe that the conflict will escalate in the Middle East, and the rhetoric will become aggressive in the next few days, leading to a reaction of the Saudi officials, who are expected to at least downgrade, if not break off, diplomatic relations with Iran.

The United States officials denounced the assassination plot as rather amateurish, but they speculated that it must have had some approval at the higher levels in Tehran. They believe that it is very possible for president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to have been completely ignorant of it, while other politicians in Tehran, newly promoted to key posts and with little knowledge of how the West operates in cases like this, may have been involved at some level.

A formal adviser to the president George W. Bush alluded that the carelessness of the plan the Iranians made, the fact that they put money into an account they were told about and that they conducted the business by phone showed that the organizers did not expect any reaction in case the plot was discovered.

Some advisers to the president of the United States say that the task that lies before the president now is to punish Iran in ways that would teach them that this kind of action does not go unpunished.

Iran has already been deemed as a sponsor to terrorism and was cut off from the American financial system since any transaction with the Iranian companies is forbidden. It is for this reason that the sanctions must be diversified so that they may actually affect the regime in Tehran.

One great way to punish Iran is within the grasp of Saudi Arabia itself, which is the biggest oil producer. A boost of crude oil production is expected to really hurt Iranian interests, given that the two countries are already in competition over this.

The Obama administration is looking for other ways to pressure Iran. The leaders of the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council were contact, and so were the authorities of Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Mexico, which are considered to have helped the U.S. authorities foil the attack.

An Iranian expert told Xinhua, the Chinese state agency, that even though the United States would thrive on another set of sanctions against Tehran chances are very slim for a UN resolution to pass on Iran, considering that it has not passed on Syria, where people are being slaughtered by the regime.

Xinhua, which represents the official point of view of the People’s Republic of China, concludes that “our experts share this point of view.” China was, along with Russia, the nation that vetoed the resolution against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, being severely criticized for that decision.

Last year the United States Security Council adopted Resolution 1929 by which Iran was punished for the failure to comply with the demands of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was the fourth round of such sanctions, and led analysts to ask whether there could be more effective sanctions than those, considering that Iran was taking them quite well.

The case against Iran was made possible by the apprehension by the American law enforcement agencies of Massour Arbabsiar, an Iranian naturalized in the United States, who is accused of having staged a plot to kill the Saudi envoy to Washington with the help of a member of the Mexican drug cartels.

Arbabsiar was supposed to tell the Mexican drug dealer to bomb the restaurant where the Saudi envoy was eating. In doing so he was consorting with another Iranian person, believed to be a member of the Quds Forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard which rules Iran.

Arbabsiar was arrested at the end of a sting operation staged by the FBI over a few months, and declared his willingness to cooperate with the American justice.

The attack is believed to by part of the rivalry between the most important Muslim states in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, which is a Sunni state, and Iran, which is a Shia state. The tensions have sharpened over the last months as a result of the Arab Spring.

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