Experts continue to debate whether the explosion at an Iranian military base at Parchin earlier in the week was an act of sabotage.
The New York Times notes that the satellite images of the incident showed evidence “reminiscent of pictures of a missile-development site 30 miles west of Tehran that was virtually destroyed during a test in November 2011 that killed 17 people, including Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, the leading force behind Iran’s advanced missile efforts.”
Nonetheless David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security, told the Times that it “could have been an accident.” However, Hussain Abdul-Hussain, writing in the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Rai, reports that European diplomatic sources in Washington confirm that “the massive blast … was no accident, but a premeditated attack by a foreign country.”
Hussain further contends that Iran believes Israel was behind the operation. According to his report, Iran tasked Hezbollah to retaliate earlier this week. The blast in Parchin, Hussain writes, “led Iran to order Hezbollah to place a bomb at Mount Dov [on the Israel-Lebanon border] which then wounded two Israeli soldiers.”
Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, believes that the Hezbollah operation may have been triggered for different reasons. “The attack appears to be part of a broader conversation that the Iranians and Hezbollah are having with the US,” Badran writes in NOW Lebanon. “Even as the operation targeted Israel, its message was as much aimed at Washington.”
To be sure, Badran explains, Hezbollah “needed to retaliate for a series of blows by Israel. This includes, most recently, the death of a Hezbollah sapper as he was dismantling an alleged Israeli listening device in Adloun last month.” But, argues Badran, Hezbollah was also signaling “that it is willing to heat things up on the border should Israel, and the U.S., allow Syrian rebels to advance from the Golan toward southeastern Lebanon.”
Rightly or wrongly, Hezbollah is convinced that Israel’s ostensible ties with Sunni Arab states—from Jordan to the Gulf sheikhdoms—also extend to various Syrian rebel groups backed by Sunni powers. That is, Hezbollah believes that Israel is working with the Sunnis through rebel units. On this reading, Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsor are telling the White House that it had better get its own bloc—Israel and the Sunnis—in line, or it is willing to take a war now consuming the rest of the Levant, from Beirut to Baghdad, to the Israeli border as well.
Given the extent to which the Obama administration and Iran have been coordinating throughout the region, the White House may well heed Hezbollah’s warning. However, it’s not clear how much Washington’s traditional regional allies are willing to listen anymore to a White House they feel has abandoned them. The real concern then is that Iran and Hezbollah may overplay their hand. As Badran writes: “Hezbollah is playing a dangerous game. It has already brought Lebanon to the edge. Sooner or later, it’s bound to push it over.”
