Friday’s assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh led to predictable hand-wringing from Obama administration alumni and their cheerleaders who midwifed the Iranian nuclear deal in 2015.
Former CIA head John Brenner was furious: “This was a criminal act & highly reckless,” he tweeted. “Such an act of state-sponsored terrorism would be a flagrant violation of international law & encourage more governments to carry out lethal attacks against foreign officials.”
Ben Rhodes, president Barack Obama’s deputy national security advisor for strategic communications – who according to a New York Times Magazine story promoted a misleading timeline among journalists about the Iran negotiations and created an “echo chamber” of reporters to sway public opinion – was indignant. “This is an outrageous action aimed at undermining diplomacy between an incoming US administration and Iran,” he tweeted. “It’s time for this ceaseless escalation to stop.”
The unstated subtext of this type of criticism is the same: Those pesky Israelis, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still leading the way, are at it again, trying to sabotage diplomatic efforts to solve the Iranian nuclear dilemma and undermine the Biden presidency from the get-go.
But that’s wrong. The assassination of Fakhrizadeh is not about Biden. Rather, it’s about Israel’s nearly three-decade effort to prevent Iran from getting a bomb. It’s about those pesky Israelis – if indeed they are behind the killing, and that has neither been acknowledged nor proven – trying to prevent what they view as an existential threat against them from coming into existence.
The assassination is just the latest in a series of steps over the last three decades taken to prevent Iran, which has said it wants to wipe Israel off the map, from getting the wherewithal to do it.
The killing of Fakhrizadeh will set back Iran’s efforts to attain the bomb because he was a key player in their nuclear program.
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