November 29, 2020 9:24:37 am
President-elect Joe Biden speaks Wednesday, Nov.25, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo / Carolyn Kaster)
Written by David E. Sanger
the scientist murder who has led Iran’s quest for 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 Iran.
And that good may have been one of the main objectives of the operation.
Intelligence officials say there is little doubt that 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 opinion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long identified Iran as an existential threat and named the slain scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, as national enemy number one, capable of building a weapon that could threaten a country of 8 million people from one single explosion.
But Netanyahu also has a second agenda.
“There must be no return to the previous nuclear deal,” he declared shortly after it became clear that Biden, who has proposed exactly that, would be the next president.
Netanyahu believes that a covert bombing program continues, through Friday under Fakhrizadeh’s leadership, and will have no restrictions after 2030, when the nuclear deal’s restrictions on Iran’s ability to produce as much nuclear fuel as it wants expire. For critics of the deal, that’s its fatal flaw.
“The reason for assassinating Fakhrizadeh was not to impede Iran’s war potential, it was to impede diplomacy,” Mark Fitzpatrick, a former State Department non-proliferation official, wrote on Twitter on Friday.
It may have been both.
Whatever the combination of reasons, Biden must fix the pieces in just seven weeks. The question is whether the agreement the president-elect has outlined, which removes the nuclear-related sanctions that President Donald Trump has imposed in the past two years if Iran strictly returns to the nuclear limits of the 2015 agreement, has been shattered. together with the Fakhrizadeh SUV. in the mountainous city of Absard, Iran, east of Tehran.
The answer lies largely in how Iran reacts in the coming weeks. On three occasions since the beginning of the year, Iran has received very visible and very damaging attacks.
First was the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian commander who led the elite Quds force of the Revolutionary Guard, in a drone strike in Iraq, where the Trump administration said it was planning strikes against US forces.
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Protesters burn an American and Israeli flag in Tehran on Saturday, November 28, 2020, a day after the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. (Arash Khamooshi / The New York Times)
Then, in early July, there was the mysterious explosion at a centrifuge research and development center in Natanz, a few hundred meters from the underground fuel production center that the United States and Israel attacked more than a decade ago with a weapon. sophisticated cybernetics.
And now the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, a dark figure often described as the Iranian equivalent of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who oversaw the Manhattan Project more than 75 years ago in the race for America to develop the world’s first nuclear weapon.
If Iran delays a meaningful retaliation, then the bold move to remove the head of the nuclear program will have been worth it, even if the assassination drives the program underground.
And if the Iranians retaliate, giving Trump a pretext to launch a return attack before he leaves office in January, Biden will inherit bigger problems than just the remnants of a 5-year diplomatic document.
Both options appear to be fine with Trump’s outgoing foreign policy team, which is trying to block the radical change in Iran’s policy that has taken place in the past four years.
“The goal of the Trump administration seems clear,” said Robert Malley, who heads the International Crisis Group and was a negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
The administration’s plan, he said, was “to use the time left before heading to the exits to solidify his legacy and make it even more difficult for his successor to resume diplomacy with Iran and rejoin the nuclear deal.” 📣 Express Explained is now on Telegram
Protesters gather in Tehran on Saturday, November 28, 2020, a day after the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. (Arash Khamooshi / The New York Times)
Malley expressed doubts that he “will actually succeed in ending the diplomacy” or the deal.
“The center of gravity in Iran is still with those who want to wait until Biden is president,” said Malley, who has known Biden’s choice for secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, since they attended high school together. in Paris.
Biden and Blinken have made it clear that returning to the deal Trump withdrew from is one of their first goals in the Middle East.
Before the assassination, there was considerable evidence that the Iranians were in hiding, avoiding provocations that could give Trump a pretense to strike before leaving office. Iran’s leaders have made it clear that the regime’s survival is their number one goal, and they have been careful not to take risks that could ruin their hopes of lifting sanctions and restoring the deal, after Trump’s term ends.
But the hardliners are angry and some experts fear the combined loss of Iran’s most revered general and its most revered nuclear scientist is too much. The pressure is already mounting for some response, be it a calculated one, presumably on the orders of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or an unscripted attack, perhaps by a rogue element of the Iranian military or an Iranian-sponsored militia that doesn’t. make. get the memo to wait for opening day.
That may be exactly what Netanyahu, and Trump and his advisers, are betting on. Any retaliation could result in military action by the United States, exactly what Trump envisioned, and was argued, two weeks ago when news broke that Iran was continuing to produce nuclear fuel above the limits of the 2015 agreement. (That measure, of course, it was in response to Trump’s decision in mid-2018 to break the deal himself.)
US military officials said on Saturday that they were closely monitoring Iranian security forces after Iran’s promise to retaliate for Fakhrizadeh’s death, but had not detected any habitual movement of Iranian troops or weapons.
Officials declined to comment on elevated US alert levels or additional measures to protect US forces in the Middle East, noting that the more than 40,000 troops in the region are already at a relatively high alert level. high.
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A protester holds an image of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh during a demonstration in Tehran on Saturday, November 28, 2020, a day after Fakhrizadeh’s death. (Arash Khamooshi / The New York Times)
A cycle of military action could make reconstitution of the Iran nuclear deal almost impossible, much less negotiate a larger and more durable diplomatic deal.
If the response to Fakhrizadeh’s assassination is a cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, the nuclear program will go further underground, literally, where bombs and saboteurs cannot reach it and cyberattacks can be ineffective.
“We must not exclude the use of force, but military strikes will not bring us a long-term closure of the program,” said R. Nicholas Burns, former deputy secretary of state and nuclear negotiator for Iran from 2005 to 2008 under the presidency. George W. Bush.
“Our goal is to roll back and shut down their nuclear program for decades to come,” said Burns, who now teaches diplomacy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and “doing that through tough diplomacy is still a smarter way. effective option than a military attack that could provoke a broader war in the Middle East. “
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