There are plenty of ironies attendant to Sunday’s suicide-bomb attack on Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel by Baluchi militants in the country’s poor and restive South East (the worst such incident since a separatist bomb killed eleven IRGC troops in 2007). Michael Rubin pointed some of these ironies out. But there are still more.

It is interesting, for instance, that the Iranians blamed the Pakistani government even though Baluchi separatists (who are Sunni, like most Pakistanis) have also been fighting for independence from Pakistan for many years. (Like the Kurds, and arguably the Pashtuns, the Baluchis are a nation without a state.) But the biggest and saddest irony is that contrary to the Iranian government’s furious claims, the U.S. and her allies almost certainly have nothing to do with the attacks or the Jundullah organization that allegedly carried it out.

(The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh claimed in 2008 that America was indeed backing various insurgent groups in Iran. Unfortunately, this claim seems to have been of a piece with his fantasy about “hundreds” of Israeli advisers working in Iraqi Kurdistan and other inaccurate or fantastic articles based on anonymous sources that apparently don’t get the rigorous fact checking for which The New Yorker is famous.)

When Iran was sponsoring attacks on U.S. and allied troops in Iraq on a daily basis beginning in 2004, it should have been made clear to Tehran that this was a game that two can play. Yes, Iran habitually blames all dissent and minority restiveness on British or American agents. But if America really had given weapons, training, money, and encouragement to Baluchi (Sunni) separatists in the South East, Arab (Sunni) separatists in Khuzestan and the South, Kurdish (mostly Sunni) separatists in the North, and even the much smaller Azeri minority, it might have made the point in a way that convinced Ahmedinejad and the Revolutionary Guards to back off.