Hand Of Iran?(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Iraq: So who bombed the Golden Mosque? Sunnis are pointing the finger at Tehran, while Tehran blames the U.S. The deeper question is this: Who has the most to fear from Iraqi democracy?

It may be years, if ever, before the case is closed to everyone's satisfaction on the Feb. 22 blast at the Shiite shrine in Samarra. Meantime, we'll hear plenty of theories, from the plausible to the paranoid. Here are two.

The first, which seems widely held among Iraq's Sunnis and at least some secular Shiites, is that Iran did it. This week, the deputy governor of the Iraqi province of Salah ad-Din, the heavily Sunni area where the Samarra shrine is found, said preliminary investigations "point to the involvement of Iran's Intelligence Ministry."

Far more imaginative is the theory being pushed aggressively by Iran's government and press organs. In this version of events, the bombing is a U.S.-Zionist-British plot, designed to further the cause of dividing and conquering Iraq's Muslims.

According to the Iranian newspaper Jomhuri-ye Eslami, the Americans were displeased with the outcome of Iraq's elections, so they "tried to attack the cultural basis of Muslim nations, namely Islam." This conspiracy started with the "publication of insolent cartoons" in Denmark. It continued with the outrage at Samarra.

Gholamali Haddad-Adel, speaker of Iran's Parliament, explained things this way: "Following the repeated failure of the occupiers of Iraq during the elections in the country, as well as the whole region, it can easily be understood that the perpetrators' objective had been to disturb Iraq's domestic situation and prevent peace and stability in the country."

But to what end? Here Tehran's logic self-destructs. The most ...