Brazen killings expose Iran's vulnerabilities as it struggles to respond

The raid alone was brazen enough. A team of Israeli commandos with high-powered torches blasted their way into a vault of a heavily guarded warehouse deep in Iran and made off before dawn with 5,000 pages of top secret papers on the country’s nuclear program.
 
A few weeks later, in April 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the contents of the pilfered documents and coyly hinted at equally bold operations that were already being planned.
 
“Remember that name,” he said as he singled out the scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as the captain of Iran’s covert attempts to assemble a nuclear weapon.Now Mr. Fakhrizadeh has become the latest casualty in an escalating campaign of audacious covert attacks seemingly designed to torment Iranian leaders with reminders of their weakness. The operations are confronting Tehran with an agonizing choice between embracing the demands of hard-liners for swift retaliation, or attempting to make a fresh start with the less implacably hostile administration of US President-elect Joseph Biden. With the killing Friday of its top nuclear scientist, Iranians are now grappling with a new sense of vulnerability, demands to purge suspected collaborators and an agonizing debate over how to respond at a delicate moment.

 

Iran has endured four years of devastating economic sanctions under a campaign of “maximum pressure” from Trump, and many Iranian leaders are desperately hoping for some measure of relief from a Biden administration. The president-elect has pledged to seek to revive a lapsed agreement that lifted sanctions against Iran in exchange for a halt to nuclear research that might produce a weapon. To pragmatic Iranians, that desire for a fresh start means Mr. Trump’s last months in office are no time for the country to lash back and risk a renewed cycle of hostilities.
 
At the same time, some Iranians are openly acknowledging that their enemies in the US and Israel may take advantage of the current moment to attack Tehran further, squeezing its leaders between domestic demands for revenge and a desire for better relations. Some hard-liners argued that the killing of Fakhrizadeh showed that Tehran should give up on waiting for a new start with Biden, if only because restraint was emboldening its foes. “If you don’t respond, they may repeat it because they know Iran won’t react,” political analyst Foad Izadi said in an interview from Tehran.

 
Within Iranian politics, analysts said, the hard-liners stood to gain the most politically from the attack. Any renewed conflict with Israel bolsters their case against negotiation with its allies in the West, said Sanam Vakil at Chatham House in London.
 
 
© The New York Times News Service, 2020