Rising tensions with Iran

The U.S. and Iran moved closer to confrontation this week, after an Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated in Tehran and the Islamic Republic threatened to attack American ships entering the Strait of Hormuz. Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan—a director of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, where Western leaders suspect Iran is developing a nuclear weapon—died after a motorcyclist attached a magnetic explosive device to his car. Iranian officials blamed the “terrorist action” on America and Israel. The assassination came just days after the regime sentenced Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, a U.S. citizen of Iranian descent, to death for spying for the CIA. Washington denied that the former Marine was a spy, and said it had played no role in Roshan’s assassination.

“The war with Iran has already begun,” said Con Coughlin in the London Telegraph. Western intelligence services have now assassinated four nuclear scientists in two years, blown up the country’s leading missile expert, and disabled Iran’s nuclear computer system with the Stuxnet computer virus. Long may this covert campaign continue. “Far better to destroy the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program by stealth” than to waste the lives of young American and British soldiers in another fight that nobody wants.

“But such a campaign is not without huge risks,” said Julian Borger in the London Guardian. So far, the Iranian regime has avoided overt reprisals, but elements of the establishment are starting to lash out in frustration, as shown by last October’s thwarted bomb plot against the Saudi ambassador to Washington, apparently the work of the Revolutionary Guard. If the West continues its covert operations, this increasingly autonomous force could attack U.S. vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, triggering a devastating conflict in shipping lanes through which a fifth of the world’s oil exports pass.

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These furtive killings could also cause Iran to speed up its nuclear program, said Jeffrey Goldberg in TheAtlantic.com. If I were a member of the Iranian regime, I’d take this “assassination program to mean that the West is entirely uninterested in any form of negotiation.” I’d ramp up uranium refinement, and attempt to join the nuclear weapons club as fast as possible. “Once I do that, I’m North Korea, or Pakistan: an untouchable country.”