Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Two bombs killed at least six people and wounded 35 others in the oil-rich Iranian city of Ahvaz in Khuzestan province, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was due to give a speech today.

Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Pour Mohammadi said those responsible for the ``terrorist'' acts were trained ``outside'' Iran's borders. One explosion occurred in a bank in Kianpour district in the southwestern city, and the other in Manabe Tabiee, state television said. Ahvaz is near the Iraqi border.

President Ahmadinejad canceled his visit to Ahvaz because of bad weather, his press office said. The bombs didn't explode at the location where he was due to speak, the office said.

Iran holds the world's second-largest oil reserves and is the No. 2 producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Khuzestan, its largest oil-producing province, has witnessed unrest in recent months that the government attributes to ethnic Arab separatists. Arabs, who make up the majority in Ahvaz, account for 3 percent of Iran's population.

Most of Iran's crude oil reserves are in Khuzestan, which is located close to the border with Iraq and to the Persian Gulf. The province is also home to two of the country's largest undeveloped oil fields -- the Azadegan and Yadavaran deposits.

A story in the Jerusalem Post quotes Iran's official news agency as describing the city of Ahvaz as " a city in southwestern Iran with a history of violence involving members of Iran's Arab minority" and it adds:

Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi said the attacks were related to last year's bombings in the city and were foreign inspired.

"Today's explosions are a continuation of the same indiscriminate attacks directed from outside the country," IRNA quoted Pourmohammadi as saying.

Ahvaz, capital of the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, has been the scene of intermittent unrest among the predominantly Persian country's Arab minority.

A major bombing in the city in October that authorities blamed on Britain and on ethnic Arabs killed several people and injured scores.

A local journalist in Ahvaz, Mojtaba Gahestuni, suggested to Radio Farda that today's explosions resembled blasts that killed more than a dozen people and wounded more than 100 in the same city in June and October. Gahestuni noted that in each case an initial blast was followed shortly thereafter by a second explosion, and that the attacks took place in crowded parts of the city.

It is unclear if robbery was the sole motive for this latest attack, but it comes just days after militants who have kidnapped four foreign oil workers and attacked a Shell oil platform said they were preparing to carry out more raids.

The rebel group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, says it wants a share of the Niger Delta region's enormous oil wealth, and is demanding the release of two local leaders.

"I'm concerned about a non-transparent society's desire to develop a nuclear weapon. The world cannot be put in a position where we can be blackmailed by a nuclear weapon," Bush said during a speech in Manhattan, Kansas.

Notwithstanding the United States' overwhelming military superiority and the asymmetry of warfighting capabilities between Iran and the US, it makes perfect sense, strategically speaking, for Iran to resort to the remedial targeting of Israel, the United States' strategic partner in the region.

In other words, Iran's current expressions of hostilities toward Israel are better understood from the prism of the US and Iran and how Tehran benefits in its incessant search for regional allies to offset US power. This it does through its anti-Israel posturing, using threats against Israel as the United States' Achilles' heel.

This brings us to the notion that Tehran's road to Washington, that is detente between the two countries, goes through Tel Aviv, and that Iran's cessation of hostilities toward Israel is the sine qua non for Washington's willingness to normalize ties with Tehran.

This is wrong, and the sooner US politicians realize it the better. Iran's US policy goes first: its Israel policy is a component of this. Put simply, Tehran's road to Washington does not travel through Jerusalem; rather, indulging in metaphors for a moment, it is a straight highway with several exit lanes, one of which is Israel.

Consequently, should a war break out between Iran and Israel in the (near) future, retrospectively it will most likely be interpreted by future historians as yet another example of how misperceptions cause war. Robert Jervis, in his important book Perception and Misperception in International Politics, has aptly detailed how the 1967 war was instigated by an Israeli misperception of the intentions of Egypt's leader, Gemal Abdul Nasser, who was vilified then as an "Arab Hitler" out to destroy Israel.

It turns out that Nasser's fiery anti-Zionist rhetoric was mostly for domestic consumption and his decision to remove the United Nations buffer forces from the Sinai and the like were not in preparation for war but simply maneuvers meant to bolster Syria's position.

Sadly, it appears that the same misperceptions are sowing the seeds of yet another bloody conflict in the Middle East, and one only hopes that learning from the past can make a difference, much as it is currently difficult to distinguish facts from misperceptions, public postures from policies and intentions.

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• Iranscam
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