By: Steve Postal – The American Spectator; spectator.org
Many details remain unclear, but it likely destabilizes the region.
This weekend marked at least the fifth assassination of arch-terrorists in Iran in 2020 when Muslim Shahdan, a senior commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), was killed while driving weapons across the Iraq–Syria border. This follows Friday’s assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist (and, less noted by the press, also a brigadier general of the IRGC) Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. There are at least three theories circulating as to the exact nature of the operation, be it an assassination involving remote-operated weapons, a small hit squad, or a larger hit squad. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United States have declared the IRGC a terrorist organization.
U.S.–Israel operation. In January, the United States assassinated IRGC major general and commander of the Quds force Qasem Soleimani, as well as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq and believed to be responsible for the 2019–20 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
The Fakhrizadeh assassination has prompted heavy-handed armchair quarterbacking from the usual suspects. Former CIA Director John Brennan called the assassination “a criminal act & highly reckless” on Twitter, implored Iranian leadership to exercise restraint, and called the assassination, in the event it was carried out by a foreign government (Brennan said he did not know if it was) “an act of state-sponsored terrorism.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) supported Brennan’s tweet. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called the assassination “reckless, provocative, and illegal” as well as “murder,” while Sanders’ foreign policy adviser, Matt Duss, accused Israel of “terrorism” and suggested that former Vice President Joe Biden, once in office as president, should re-enter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to teach Israel the lesson that “terrorism doesn’t work.”