On Oct. 11, the U.S. Department of Justice caused quite a stir by implicating the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, in plotting the assassination of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir.
There has been a great deal of skepticism that the Iranian regime was in fact behind the plot, because it was so sloppily planned. And both Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameinei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ridiculed the accusation as fiction, designed to cause a rift between Iran and Saudi Arabia and to divert attention from America’s many problems.
Iranian officials have dismissed the alleged plot as a “bad Hollywood script.”
Notwithstanding the skepticism, Iran is known to have had a role in assassinations of its critics in several countries — in Lebanon, for example, of prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005; in Paris in 1991 of former Iranian prime minister Shapour Bhaktiar; and bombings in Argentina and Saudi Arabia in the 1990s.
A naturalized Iranian American citizen — Mansour Arbabsiar from Texas — has been charged with the plot and is in custody. The other accused, a member of the Quds Force, Gholam Shakuri, is reportedly in Iran. Allegedly $1.5 million was to be the payment to killers from a Mexican drug cartel to carry out the assassination.
Assuming that Iran is indeed involved, how should the international community respond? As he announced the plot, Attorney General Eric Holder called it “a flagrant violation of international law” and said that the U.S. is committed to holding Iran responsible for its actions. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said his country would “strongly respond” within “the framework of international law, which Iran has violated.” The Saudi ambassador has asked U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to request the Security Council to discuss the alleged plot.
The Shiite and Sunni rift, on the one hand, and Iran’s drive to become the major power in the region on the other, have pitted Iran and Saudi Arabia against each other. Iran has built strong ties with Iraq and Hamas, as well as with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the opposition in Yemen and Jordan. The uprisings in Bahrain and Syria have exacerbated the situation, as Saudi troops intervened in Bahrain to crush the Shiite opposition and Iranian security forces supported President Bashar al-Assad in Syria to quell the popular rebellion there.
Under international law, every country has sovereignty over its territory, which is considered inviolable, so that no other nation can challenge it. However, covert actions violating this mandate are commonplace. When Iranian nuclear scientists were murdered on Iranian soil, “foreigners” — a code word for the U.S. and Israel — were blamed for having waged an “all-out, multifront war” against Iran. Also, Iran’s program to enrich uranium has been sabotaged by the smuggling of damaged components into Iran’s supply-chain and the destruction of centrifuges through cyber-warfare.
President Obama has said Iran would face the “toughest sanctions” for plotting this scheme. Military action is not contemplated. The U.S. is calling upon the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency to make public its reports on Iran’s enriching uranium, which, Iran says, is needed for a medical research reactor but which the U.S. argues is for producing nuclear weapons.
The U.S. intends to isolate Iran further by banning the purchase of petroleum products from companies controlled by the Revolutionary Guards. Reportedly under consideration are measures to prohibit the sale of aviation gas to Iranian airlines, ban oil tankers from U.S. ports that have stopped in Iran, and strengthen financial sanctions by blacklisting Iran’s Central Bank.
What about an embargo on Iranian crude oil exports? Iran, with the third-largest known oil reserves, would be severely hurt by that, but it would also have a disastrous effect on the world’s oil markets, so this is not likely.
Ved P. Nanda (vnanda@ law.du. edu) is Evans Distinguished University Professor and director of the International Legal Studies Program at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
