Assassination in Iran could limit Biden’s options. Was that the goal?
The assassination of the scientist who led Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon for the past two decades threatens to cripple President-elect Joe Biden’s effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal before he can even begin his diplomacy with Tehran.
And that may well have been a main goal of the operation.
Intelligence officials say there is little doubt Israel was behind the killing — it had all the hallmarks of a precisely timed operation by Mossad, the country’s spy agency. And the Israelis have done nothing to dispel that view.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long identified Iran as an existential threat and named the assassinated scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, as capable of building a weapon that could threaten a country of 8 million in a single blast.
But Netanyahu also has a second agenda.
“There must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement,” he declared shortly after it became clear Biden — who has proposed exactly that — would be the next President.
Netanyahu believes a covert bomb programme is continuing and would be unconstrained after 2030, when the nuclear accord’s restraints on Iran’s ability to produce as much nuclear fuel as it wants expires. To critics of the deal, that is its fatal flaw.
“The reason for assassinating Fakhrizadeh wasn’t to impede Iran’s war potential, it was to impede diplomacy,” Mark Fitzpatrick, a former State Department non-proliferation official, wrote on Twitter.
It may have been both. Whatever the mix of motives, Biden must pick up the pieces in just seven weeks. The question is whether the deal the President-elect has outlined — dropping the nuclear-related sanctions President Donald Trump has imposed if Iran returns to the nuclear limits in the 2015 accord — was shot to pieces along with Fakhrizadeh’s SUV in the mountain town of Absard, Iran, east of Tehran.
The answer lies largely in how Iran reacts in the next few weeks.
Since the start of the year, Iran has been on the receiving end of three humiliating, highly damaging attacks.
First came the killing of General Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian commander who ran the elite Quds force of the Revolutionary Guard, in a drone strike in Iraq, where the Trump Administration claimed he was planning attacks on US forces.
Then in early July came the mysterious explosion at a centrifuge research and development centre at Natanz, a few hundred yards from the underground fuel-production centre that the US and Israel attacked more than a decade ago with a sophisticated cyberweapon.
And now the killing of Fakhrizadeh, a shadowy figure often described as the Iranian equivalent of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who oversaw America’s Manhattan Project more than 75 years ago.
If Iran holds off on significant retaliation, then taking out the nuclear programme chief will have paid off, even if the assassination drives the programme further underground. And if the Iranians retaliate, giving Trump a pretext to launch a return strike before he leaves office in January, Biden will be inheriting bigger problems than just the wreckage of a five-year-old diplomatic document.
Both outcomes are a win for Trump’s departing foreign policy team, which is trying to lock in the radical reversal of Iran policy that has taken place over the past four years.
“The Trump Administration’s goal seems plain,” said Robert Malley, who leads the International Crisis Group and was a negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The plan, he said, was “to take advantage of the time remaining to solidify its legacy and make it all the more difficult for its successor to resume diplomacy with Iran and rejoin the nuclear deal”.
However, Malley doubts that will succeed.
Before the assassination, there was considerable evidence the Iranians were lying low, avoiding provocations that might give Trump a pretence to strike before he leaves office. Iran’s leaders have made it clear that regime survival is their number one goal, and they have been careful not to take risks that could upend their hopes of lifting sanctions, and restoring the deal, after Trump’s term ends.
But the hard-liners are angry, and some experts fear the combined loss of Iran’s most revered general and its most revered nuclear scientist is too much.
Pressure is already mounting for some response — either a calculated one, presumably on the orders of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or an unscripted lashing out, perhaps by a rogue element of the Iranian military or an Iraniansponsored militia.
That may be exactly what Netanyahu — and Trump and his advisers — is betting on.
Any retaliation could result in US military action, exactly what Trump contemplated two weeks ago when news came that Iran was continuing to produce nuclear fuel above the limits of the 2015 accord (in response to Trump’s decision to break out of the agreement).
US military officials said they were closely monitoring Iranian security forces after Iran’s vow to retaliate for Fakhrizadeh’s death but they had not detected any usual Iranian troop or weaponry movements.
A cycle of military action could make it all but impossible to reconstitute the Iran nuclear deal, much less negotiate a bigger, longerlasting diplomatic arrangement.
If the response to the killing of Fakhrizadeh is a cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, the nuclear programme will go deeper underground — quite literally — where bombs and saboteurs cannot reach it, and cyberstrikes may be ineffective.
“We should not exclude the use of force, but military strikes won’t bring us a long-term shutdown of the programme,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former undersecretary of state and the Iran nuclear negotiator from 2005 to 2008 under President George W. Bush.
“Our goal is to roll back and shut down its nuclear programme for decades to come,” said Burns, who now teaches diplomacy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and “achieving that through tough-minded diplomacy is still a smarter and more effective option than a military strike that could provoke a wider war in the Middle East”.