The day after the head of the Israeli army, the IDF, said that Iran should expect ‘unnatural events’ in the coming year, another nuclear scientist was assassinated on his way to work in Tehran.

Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan’s car had a bomb attached to it by a motorcyclist. The device was sophisticated, aimed at killing the car’s occupant while doing little damage to its surroundings. The motorcycle disappeared in traffic.

This was the fourth attack on Iran’s nuclear scientists in two years. Roshan worked at the nuclear plant at Natanz near Tehran, targeted as a centre of alleged nuclear weapons development by the Iranian regime. It follows a series of attacks on Iranian targets, many of them suspected of being carried out by Israeli secret services.

Iran clearly sees this latest attack as Israeli inspired and US backed. Israel has some form on this; for example its deadly attack on Hamas leader Mahmoud al Mahbouh in Dubai two years ago. More importantly it has started 2012 as it means to go on: with a campaign aimed at engaging Iran in a war and at pulling in Israel’s western allies in support of that project.

In less than two weeks, the EU will confirm a further ratcheting up of sanctions against Iran when it agrees to an oil embargo from the summer and a ban on the import of petrochemical products. This follows US prohibition on the financing of Iranian oil trade, also to come into effect in the summer.

Unlike its response to most acts of assassination and terrorism around the world, the ‘international community’ has been remarkably reticent in condemning this attack. Hillary Clinton denied any US involvement in the assassination but talked about Iran’s ‘provocative behaviour’.  Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said ‘I have no idea who targeted the Iranian scientist but I certainly don't shed a tear.’

There will be few in the Middle East who doubt Israel’s involvement. Many around the world will be horrified at what can only be another escalation of tension with Iran. For an administration which claims it doesn’t want war with Iran, the Obama White house is helping to ramp up threats any one of which could spark the fire of war in the Middle East.

In such an atmosphere the threat of war can turn into war very quickly, especially in an atmosphere of domestic tension in the run up to local elections in Iran this March. Talks of closing the Straits of Hormuz to western oil traffic may still be some way from reality, but the US threat to further patrol the Gulf from its navy base in Bahrain will only create further tensions.

Israel and its allies are playing a very dangerous game – but it is a game at least some of them are prepared to see through to the end because they are determined to end what they see as the major barrier to western interests in the region.

They ignore the fact that their policies of the "war on terror" over the past decade have helped create this situation. And any war with Iran will create more terror, more war and more barriers to ‘western interests’ across the world.