The assassination of Iran's top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, near Tehran in an ambush on Friday has increased risks of a new round of conflict in the region. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said there were "serious indications of an Israeli role" in it while the state television reminded its audiences that "Israel had an old enmity towards him." Indeed, two years ago, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the only Middle Eastern country in possession of nuclear weapons, had described Fakhrizadeh as the father of Iran's nuclear weapons programme, telling his supports to "remember that name." The name surely caught the attention of the whimsical US President Donald Trump who had walked his country out of the 2015 P5+1 Iran nuclear deal. According to media reports, at a meeting held last Thursday he asked his senior advisers to be briefed about the options for a strike on Iran's main nuclear site - at Natanz. Informed that military action could lead to a broader conflict in the region, he is reported to have decided not to go forward. Yet he is likely to have given a nod and a wink to his friend Netanyahu to take that reckless action in the less than two months left of his presidency. Trump seemed to have indirectly acknowledged complicity when he retweeted reports of the assassination without comment, though.
Iran, of course, is no Iraq where in a 1981 surprise air strike Israel had destroyed an under-construction nuclear reactor and got away with it, too. In fact, sensing that something was in the works, the government spokesman in Tehran had warned only last Tuesday that "any action against the Iranian nation would certainly face a crushing response." These are no empty words, as President Trump learned to his chagrin earlier this year when he ordered a drone strike in Iraq killing Iran's senior-most commander Qasem Soleimani who spearheaded his country's military and intelligence operations in the region. The Islamic republic had retaliated immediate by firing several ballistic missiles at US military bases in Iraq. Although no one was killed, Washington later acknowledged that more than 100 of its men suffered from traumatic brain injuries. And yet apprehending a similar response to any further escalatory action Trump had let the matter rest at that. Fakhrizadeh's assassination is not going to remain unanswered, either. Nor is it going to stop Iran from pursuing whatever activity he was leading. Israel has killed some other Iranian nuclear scientist before. The only sane way forward is offered by the nuclear deal painstakingly concluded by the five permanent UN Security Council members and the Islamic republic, abandoned by Trump.
US President-elect Joe Biden had said during his campaign that his administration would return to the nuclear deal. Tehran has also indicated it would be willing to engage with the new administration in hopes of having crippling economic sanctions relaxed. Hence it may not directly target American interests. But a likely retaliatory response to the present provocation in one way or another can cause complications for Biden, undermining renewal of diplomacy between the two sides and creating further instability in an already very unstable Middle East.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020
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