Asif Merchant is a screwup.
A native of Pakistan, Merchant has been arrested and is accused of taking part in an assassination plot against "senior government officials" in the United States. As of this writing, he only faces one charge; a single count of murder by hire, after a sting operation resulted in his paying $5,000 to an undercover FBI agent posing as a hitman. But while he is from Pakistan, Merchant spent time in Iran, and was presumably trained there; FBI Director Christopher Wray described his attempt as being " straight out of the Iranian playbook."
We don't know who Merchant was targeting, but the fact that he was caught up in a sting tells us one thing: He wasn't the best and brightest available to Iran.
The complaint does not name an alleged target or targets, but a senior law enforcement official said Trump was one of the potential targets of this plot.
“This dangerous murder-for-hire plot exposed in today’s charges allegedly was orchestrated by a Pakistani national with close ties to Iran and is straight out of the Iranian playbook,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.
This begs the question: What would Iran hope to gain by sending a half-wit to do the job of a, well, full-wit? They no doubt have their reasons, even if some in the legacy media and our government are badly underestimating their capabilities.
Law enforcement officials and experts who study the Iranian regime say it’s more difficult than most people realize for Iran to carry out a covert operation inside the U.S. Iran has no embassy here to host intelligence officers, and the U.S. intelligence and border protection agencies have been fairly successful at keeping out Iranians with ties to that country’s military and spy services.
“They can’t get in here,” said Kenneth Katzman, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center who spent decades following Iran for the Congressional Research Service. “They are working with people who are able to gain access here, which means they have to work with undesirable people. Iranian agents don’t get in here that easily.”
That's a dangerous underestimation of Iran's capabilities here. Iran, or indeed any state sponsor of terror, doesn't need an embassy to conduct operations inside the U.S. - it makes it harder, but not all that much. Israel, only recently, gave us a textbook example of how to penetrate a hostile nation, locate a chief terrorist operative, and reduce him to a pink mist; at least we presume it was Israel, as the Israelis are, as is their habit, playing this close to the chest.
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And the sad fact is that "they" - the bad guys - can get in here, and do so routinely. So what if they have to work with undesirable people? They are themselves undesirable people,to engage in a gross understatement. Also, we know perfectly well that people on the terror watch list are routinely caught trying to enter the country - and released.
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Why is it in Iran's interest to send half-wit screwups like Asif Merchant? It's called intelligence gathering.
There is an apocryphal story from our Civil War, when after a major battle late in the war the press was lauding as a win for Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, a reporter collared Union General Grant and asked him to comment about his loss. "It doesn't matter," Grant replied. "Even when he wins, he loses. He can't keep winning with what he has left."
In that case, the war, as are almost all wars, was decided by logistics, and that is what Grant was referring to; the Union could replace weapons and munitions, could recruit, feed, and clothe more troops, but the Confederacy was out of all of those things. In this case, it's a war of intelligence. Iran sends out these incompetents as not-so-smart drones, to test America's border, our police and legal systems, the structure of our culture, and so on, and even when they lose - even when one of their operators like Merchant gets caught - they still win. They still have greater insight with every failure, and more options for how to carry out successful operations, where, when, and how to select targets and hit them for the best effect.
Iran, we are certain, has better operators. They doubtless have much more intelligent, better-trained, more dedicated, and more effective operators, and thanks to the utter calamity that is our nation's border security, they may very well already be here. And we will only learn of their presence when they pull off a win - another 9/11, another 10/7, or something even worse. And consider this: They can easily get operators across our border; they can get weapons across, too. Imagine an assassination attempt of a political figure at a rally - only instead of a punk with an AR-15, it was two guys with an RPG.
The Iranians are crazy. But we should not presume that they are also stupid. They aren't, and in this area of operations, we underestimate them at our peril.
