"It’s a fusion-cuisine salad bar of U.S. security anxieties..."

"... It’s a fusion-cuisine salad bar of U.S. security anxieties. Crazy Iranian terrorists and violent Mexican narcotraffickers. No wonder FBI Director Robert Mueller called the plot straight out of Hollywood.

But here’s why you should hope it really went down the way the government describes, as hard as that is to believe...

If any of this is remotely true, then the crack intelligence work of the Qods Force is stunning to behold. The Mexican informant taped Arbabsiar’s telephone calls. They reveal some laughably insipid code words. Icing al-Jubair is referred to as “painting the house” (sigh, Sigh, sigh...)— Arbabsiar made sure to remind his interlocutor that the house couldn’t be left half-painted — and al-Jubair himself was “Chevrolet.”

... In custody, Arbabsiar cracked and blamed the Qods Force for the plot....

The Qods Force is no joke — or, until the release of the criminal complaint, it was hard to think of it as a joke. The U.S. accused it of smuggling deadly bombs into Iraq (though sometimes without much evidence). As Thomas Jocelyn the Weekly Standard reminds, the Qods Force — and specifically Shahlai — was behind one of the most sophisticated and brazen attacks on U.S. forces of the whole Iraq war, an ambush on a Karbala facility. And it’s believed to be responsible for training and funding Iran’s various terrorist proxies, chiefly Hezbollah.

Which raises an obvious question: Why would such a sophisticated organization with ties to known terrorists risk establishing a new partnership with an unknown Mexican drug gang for an operation with such high stakes? ...... let’s give the government the benefit of the doubt. If the plot really went down the way the government alleges, then Iran’s most feared military/intelligence arm looks like a bunch of miscalculating buffoons. And these are the people, David Petraeus has recounted, whom Iran’s regime relies upon to cultivate Iranian influence throughout the Mideast. ...."