So farewell then, "Iran's Robert Oppenheimer":
Iran's most senior nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh has been assassinated near the capital Tehran, the country's defence ministry has confirmed.
Fakhrizadeh died in hospital after an attack in Absard, in Damavand county.
Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, has condemned the killing "as an act of state terror".
Western intelligence agencies view Fakhrizadeh as being behind a covert Iranian nuclear weapons programme.
"If Iran ever chose to weaponise (enrichment), Fakhrizadeh would be known as the father of the Iranian bomb," one Western diplomat told Reuters news agency in 2014.
Iran insists its nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes.
Between 2010 and 2012, four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated and Iran has accused Israel of complicity in the killings.
Fakhrizadeh's name was specifically mentioned in Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's presentation about Iran's nuclear programme in May 2018....
The commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has said that Iran will avenge the killing of the scientist.
Just like they avenged the killing of Soleimani in January....which is to say, not at all. Lots of noise, not much in the way of action.
Jake Wallis Simons in the Spectator is quick off the mark with his reaction: this is all about Trump:
Whoever carried out the hit, it is all but certain that Trump gave it the nod. Once again, he is trying to put a stamp on the Middle East that Biden will find difficult to scrub out. His actions would hardly be without precedent; Obama, Clinton and Reagan all made last-gasp moves in the region to shape it in their image. But none of these Presidents were anywhere near as belligerent or pro-Israel.
First there was intense speculation that Trump was building up to a last-minute attack on Iran. It lasted for a news cycle, but never transpired. It may be that he opted to give the nod to an assassination instead. Then the US Special Representative on Iran, Elliott Abrahams, met the Israeli prime minister earlier this month to discuss a laundry list of new sanctions to be slapped on Iran. And during Mike Pompeo’s whistle-stop tour of the Middle East, he became the first secretary of state to visit a West Bank settlement – and convened a secret summit in Saudi Arabia with Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump has always made as many enemies as friends. Some would say more so. But when it comes to the Middle East, even people who naturally dislike him confess a sense of dread at the impending Biden years.
I count myself among them....
The reason, of course, is that Biden has pledged to revive Obama's disastrous JCPOA, so long as Iran ‘returns to strict compliance’.
But Obama’s deal was deeply flawed. It may have made the Iranians pause their nuclear weapon programme, but did not require them to abandon the ability to fire it up again.
Iranian claims that their intentions were peaceful went unchallenged, despite evidence to the contrary (why would a civilian project need to enrich uranium? Why the illicit facilities at Natanz and Arak?).
Given the number of times Iran has been caught lying since it started pursuing the bomb in the nineties, and given its long history of profound duplicity, manipulation and belligerence, the JCPOA seemed dangerously naïve.
Perhaps more egregiously, the deal was so focused on the nuclear threat that it failed to adequately address Iran’s mischief-making across the region – and ended up fuelling it.
The theocracy had only come to the negotiating table in the first place because of sustained economic punishment. But under the JCPOA, sanctions on petrochemicals, gold and other precious metals were lifted, and £3 billion in frozen oil revenue was released....
There are fears that if Biden makes good on his promise to reopen Obama's deal, the flood of fresh cash could give Iranian adventurism another unwelcome boost.
The president-elect has only vaguely addressed this point. ‘We will continue to push back against Iran's destabilising activities, which threaten our friends and partners in the region,’ he wrote in September.
‘We will continue to use targeted sanctions against Iran's human rights abuses, its support for terrorism and ballistic missile programme.’
In other words, he proposes closing the chequebook with one hand while handing over billions of nuclear dollars with the other.
The sense of softness is heightened by the fact that Antony Blinken, Biden’s pick for Secretary of State, argued against designating the Revolutionary Guards a foreign terrorist organisation in 2017.
Iran has suffered since Trump came to power. Sanctions, and the coronavirus, have hit it badly. Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in Lebanon, have been having a hard time since that Beirut port explosion. The anti-Iranian grouping of Israel with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States is much stronger now, especially with the Abraham Accords normalising relations between Israel and Bahrain and the UAE.
A final Trump card from the outgoing president, then?
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