Reuters: "...An assassination attempt, particularly in America, is so un-Iranian!"

"... U.S. evidence rests mainly on Arbabsiar's (a self professed Anti-Iran Regime petty criminal from Texas!) alleged confession that he had acted for men he thought were top Quds officials.
Yet questions abound over the putative plot, not least the classic ones of motive and means. Many analysts are skeptical.
What could Iran hope to gain from an assassination that would have brought fierce retribution? Why try to recruit a hitman from a Mexican drug cartel instead of using its own?... 
"Killing the Saudi envoy in America has no benefit for Iran," said independent Iranian analyst Saeed Leylaz. "Why should Iran create hostility when the region is boiling?
Dismissing the "very amateur scenario" as out of character, he said: "Iran might have conducted some political adventurism like denying the Holocaust, but an assassination attempt, particularly in America, is so un-Iranian."

It would certainly be a departure for Iran, although it has assassinated its own dissidents abroad since the 1979 Islamic revolution, and it has used Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon and Shi'ite militias in Iraq to further its own aims.
Decision-making in Tehran is murky and factional rivalry is rife. But the idea that rogue Quds elements could concoct such a momentous plot seems a stretch. (Little Saad Hariri peddles 'rogue Hezbollah elements' all the time!) That Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would authorize it seems more so....
"However, this plot seems far-fetched considering the Iranian intelligence services' usual methods of operation and the fact that its ramifications would involved substantial political risk," it added.
Former CIA agent Robert Baer poured scorn on the reported Iranian conspiracy. "This stinks to holy hell," he told Britain's Guardian newspaper. "The Quds Force are very good. They don't sit down with people they don't know and make a plot. They use proxies and they are professional about it."...