Israel compares its assassinations of the top level of Iran’s leadership to severing the head of an octopus.
A campaign unmatched in modern warfare started by taking out Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. As it targets the tentacles of the regime, Israel on Wednesday killed intelligence minister Esmail Khatib, a day after the country’s de facto leader Ali Larijani also perished.
Israel has previously killed leaders of terrorist groups, including Hezbollah and Hamas — and even Iranian officials in places such as Syria.
But now, by escalating against leaders in a direct state-on-state war, it is making a statement of military might and showing that its enemies have nowhere to hide. It is also reflecting the evolving reach of combat enabled by new precision weapons and remarkable intelligence penetration.
The latest strikes represent an attempt to change the political realities in Tehran while thousands of air attacks, alongside US forces, devastate the Islamic Republic’s capacity to threaten the outside world with missiles and drones.
Assassinations of foreign leaders have long been considered illegal under US and international law. Many critics view the Iran war itself as an insult to a fast-eroding rules-based global system.
But strikes to decapitate the regime have an attraction to more powerful states like the United States and Israel as they seek to shorten fighting, wound repressive regimes and dodge quagmires.
Killing leaders might weaken the regime by deterring lower-ranking officials from stepping into jobs that come with a death sentence.
But while such assassinations hold powerful symbolism, their long-term political and strategic impacts are less clear. For one thing, martyrdom is embedded in the ideology of the Iranian Islamic Republic.
So, while eliminating a top seam of leadership might shorten the war, it might also incite vengeance while closing diplomatic off-ramps — dragging the war on longer.
Since Iran’s leaders are reported to have devolved power before the war in anticipation that they’d become targets, there is no certainty that wiping out clerics and military brass will destroy the regime. And committing to a program to eliminate every new leader who emerges to replace a martyred superior could lead to almost perpetual warfare.
A long record of targeting foreign kingpins
The idea of assassinating foreign leaders in wartime is not new.
Britain considered and abandoned several plots to kill Adolf Hitler in World War II. Intelligence work and tight operational security meant purported Nazi plots to kill Prime Minister Winston Churchill and other allied leaders failed. The CIA tried multiple times to kill the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, according to congressional reports and testimony from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Successive US administrations sent the military after non-state al Qaeda and ISIS leaders, including Osama bin Laden. And in his first term, Trump ordered the killing of Iranian security chief Qasem Soleimani — one of the most important Iranian leaders — at Baghdad airport.
In 2003, the United States tried and failed to kill Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein at the start of the US invasion.
Later in the conflict, US intelligence analysts created a pack of cards to assign value to regime leaders whom Washington wanted captured or killed. Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, were the ace of hearts and ace of clubs until they died in a gun battle. Their father, the ace of spades, discovered hiding in a hole in his hometown of Tikrit, was later hanged.
But the swagger that led to the card deck is remembered more for hubris than as an example of successful regime decapitation. It revealed a misperception in Washington that the elimination of key figures would lead to a democratic Iraq. Instead, a horrendous insurgency erupted that took the US years to escape.
The question now is whether America’s new war will create liberation and stability by killing top leaders.
While the US and Israeli strategy of neutralizing the Iranian military threat appears to have caused immense damage and may be an operational success, there are so far no signs the Islamic revolutionary regime is collapsing.
Trump’s goals in Iran and rationale for the war might be ill-defined. But Netanyahu’s have been no secret for decades: the destruction of what he regards as Iran’s existential threat to Israel and its regime.
Israel frames its attacks on Iranian leaders as self-defense against what it regards as a terrorist state led by commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with whom it’s long been locked in a simmering war.
Instead of capitulating, Iran reacted to the killing of senior regime leaders with defiance. It, for example, targeted Tel Aviv with ballistic missiles in line with a vow to widen the war to avenge Larijani.
Netanyahu also argues — much more specifically than Trump — that the attacks on the Iranian leaders are a direct attempt to incite a counter-revolution.
“We are undermining this regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people an opportunity to remove it,” Netanyahu said in announcing Larijani’s death. “It will not happen all at once, and it will not happen easily. But if we persist, we will give them the chance to take their destiny into their own hands.”
But there are alternative, less hopeful scenarios. A desire to avenge lost leaders could cause their successors to intensify repression against civilians Trump once vowed to protect. If regime decapitation is a catastrophic success, a governmental collapse could unleash the splintering of the state and civil war.
A theology of suffering
Some experts think it’s unlikely leader assassinations will promote positive political change. Bader Al-Saif, an intellectual historian, said on a Middle East Institute conference call Wednesday that Iranian leaders could reinforce their defiance. “I mean, to them, assassination — they’ll take (it) on.” He added: “This regime thrives on a theology of suffering, so the more assassinations, the more resilient they’ll become and lesser experienced individuals will be bumped up into newer ranks.”
Sina Azodi, director of the Middle East Studies program at George Washington University, told CNN’s Becky Anderson that Larijani’s killing might prove counterproductive. “From a practical standpoint, of course, it’s an achievement for the Israelis. But I’m afraid that it will ultimately lead to a … hardening of the regime and not the collapse of the regime,” Azodi said.
Trump admitted earlier in the war that the removal of key leaders might hamper the chances of a political transition.
“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump told Jonathan Karl of ABC News. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”
Wiping out leaders might also remove an incentive for negotiation or the expertise Iranians might need to reach a “deal” with Trump.
The United States “has supported Israel in eliminating pragmatist figures within the Iranian government,” said Daniel Sheffield, an assistant professor at the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. “To imagine an endgame to this war through diplomacy — it’s very difficult.”
If assassinations do close potential off-ramps to the war, they deepen complications that are thwarting Trump’s capacity to define how it ends.
Ultimately, the strategy of decapitating the leadership will be judged less by who it kills than what it leaves behind.
