Israeli Iran attack? What goes around comes around.

Malcolm X said, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, that “the chickens have come home to roost,” by which he meant that the violence of American interventionist foreign policy had come back to haunt the country.

The exposure of a possible Iranian bomb-making cell in Thailand, and the coordinated attacks against Israeli targets in India and Georgia, remind us of the truth behind Malcom X’s remark. It may be no accident that the attacks occurred only days after US officials confirmed in an MSNBC report that Israel’s Mossad and the Iranian terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) have been collaborating on assassinating Iranian scientists and attacking military bases.

The attacks appear to represent tit-for-tat responses to a long-term covert war against Iran by Israel, along with logistical support offered by the United States, including technical support for the development of the Stuxnet computer worm that targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010.

Even the method of attack in India mimics Israel-MEK assassinations in Iran, with a motorcyclist sticking a magnetic bomb to the car of an Israeli military attaché while his wife was stuck in traffic.

Iran has denied any involvement. Though the plot in Thailand appears utterly amateurish, and there are questions as to why Iran might choose India – one of the most important importers of its oil – to attack the Israeli diplomats, the denial might be self-serving. Israel does have a well-developed military relationship with Georgia, as it does with India, and has tried to use Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Kurdish region of Iraq to spy on Iran, and presumably exploit their territory for its covert war against Iran.

Iran’s presumed involvement is meant as an explicit warning not just to Israel, but also to the US, of what is in store if the covert war against the Islamic republic continues or if Israel attacks it militarily.

We are entering a dangerous new stage of the confrontation in which Iran feels it must respond in kind to attacks against it. When two nations begin to engage in such patterns of attacks and counterattacks, it becomes much easier for a mistake or misjudgment to lead to a disaster.

All it would take is an attempt to blow up an Israeli embassy or the killing of an official to provoke a full-scale regional war. This is precisely what happened in 1982, when terrorists attempted to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to London. Israel’s defense minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, used the attempt as a pretext to invade Lebanon.

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