For once, the fractious community of Iran experts seems to agree on something: the story of the plot on the Saudi Ambassador’s life is perplexing, bizarre—perhaps nonsensical. Iran’s élite, secretive Quds Force, the division of the Revolutionary Guards responsible for operations abroad, allegedly entrusted its most sensitive operation to Mansour Arbabsiar, a Texas used-car salesman with a criminal record, a history of drug and alcohol abuse, and a reputation for fecklessness and financial problems. He had lost his home to foreclosure and his wife to divorce when he took up the assassination plot. He had no proved fealty—personal, religious, or ideological—to the Iranian regime. What he did have was a need for cash, and the disadvantage of being easily traced to the other alleged conspirators, one of whom was his cousin. Moreover, he was apparently meant to outsource the operation to a Mexican drug cartel—known to be infiltrated by American law enforcement—which would dispatch operatives the Iranians had never met or even seen, let alone vetted. All of this was casually arranged on regular international telephone lines, and paid for by direct wire transfers in amounts so large as to trigger automatic federal monitoring.

It hardly sounds like the Iran we know, a regime that is paranoid and opaque even in its quotidian affairs, and nothing if not professional in its covert operations abroad. When Iran has struck foreign targets, observers note, it has been through trusted local proxies, like Hezbollah, which have allowed Tehran to operate behind a carefully constructed screen of deniability. The individuals targeted for assassination have almost all been Iranian. Perhaps because of the sensitivity of Iran-U.S. relations, or perhaps because the United States has presented a particularly hard target for Iranian agents to infiltrate, there has been only one such assassination in the United States, and that was back in 1980.

The weirdness of the Arbabsiar case has, unfortunately, fed a mill that already loves to churn up conspiracies. Who benefits? Blowing up a Washington, D.C., restaurant to kill a Saudi ambassador: exactly what would Iran stand to gain? Is that particular Saudi ambassador really in the way of any Iranian political objective? It doesn’t take a foreign-policy mastermind or an evil genius to see that assassinating him could only result in increased hostilities between Iran and the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. At worst, it could furnish the perfect pretext for a military attack on Iran. At best, it might provoke Saudi Arabia to harass Iran with all the means at its disposal: driving down the price of oil, suppressing Bahraini Shiites, stirring up sectarian trouble in Iraq, and encouraging the Syrian opposition, to name a few.

I’ve long believed that the Iranian regime stands to gain from provoking external antagonism— up to a point. Not war, but rumors of war: the Iranian regime excels in dancing up to the line, then drawing back. (Here again the current plot looks out of character: too brash, too clumsy, too direct.) From its very inception, the Islamic Republic defined and strengthened itself by promoting an atmosphere of siege, whether the external enemy was Iraq, the United States, or the West more generally. That the Islamic Republic is an affront to America, and that America presents a military threat and a cultural onslaught, is practically a raison d’être. After 1989, with the end of the Iran-Iraq war and the petering out of the Cold War, sustaining this atmosphere became more difficult. Fortunately for the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, it got a lot easier during the Bush years, with the Axis of Evil and with U.S. troops in two neighboring countries.

The Obama Administration, however, confounded all that. It came in with a rhetoric of engagement and dialogue. And yet it took less than two years for parties on all sides to once again sound the alarm about a coming U.S. war with Iran.

I’m skeptical. Part of that is experience: the alarm has been sounding for decades, and the war never comes. Part is the creeping suspicion that too many people have too much invested in stoking hysteria. The Iranian regime wants its people to believe the Americans will attack, because it believes this will help it hang on to power. The U.S. government wants the Iranians to believe it just might attack, because otherwise the United States has very little leverage in nuclear negotiations. The Israelis want the Iranians to fear an American attack, because they believe this will deter Iranian moves against Israeli interests. The Saudis, too, would like to use a bellicose American ally as leverage against Iran, their regional rival. Then, there’s American domestic politics. The Republicans bluster against Iran to prove that they are tough and that the Democrats are appeasers; the Democrats bluster against Iran to prove that they are no such thing. The neoconservative right encourages the conclusion that the only solution is military; the anti-imperialist left forever argues that the neoconservatives are secretly steering America toward war. It could be my sheer perversity that prevents me from believing what everyone wants me to believe. Or it could be that none of these parties have satisfactorily proved that anyone actually in power believes an attack on Iran would advance American interests more than it would set them back.

So has the Obama Administration grossly overinterpreted thin data? Has the Iranian regime lost its mind? I do not think, as some commentators seem to, that the cautious, reactive Obama Administration has set the Iranians up with the assassination story—framed the Revolutionary Guard in order to provoke a war on the eve of the American Presidential election. But it is also hard to imagine that Khamenei is so desperate, or so reckless, as to order a blatant act of terrorism on American soil, arranged in such a way as to make the return address glaringly clear. That would be one dramatic Hail Mary, thinkable only in the case of a regime that felt itself moments from crumbling—and there is little reason to think that the Iranians see their situation that darkly.

The Internet is abuzz with speculative scenarios. Maybe a radical faction within the Iranian establishment thought it could benefit from conflict, perhaps in order to renounce the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, or to score some other domestic advantage. Maybe, as Gareth Porter has intriguingly argued, Arbabsiar was trying to link Iranian drug traffickers or black marketeers within the Revolutionary Guard to the Mexican cartel, when the D.E.A. agent within the cartel decided to entrap him. I don’t have an answer. But, for my money, someone—no, everyone—wants the world to believe that Iran is about to come under attack. Let’s watch that not happen as the details of this case come, we hope, to light.

AP Photo/Nuences County Sheriff’s Office.