Juan Cole 04/03/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Israel’s airstrikes Monday on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, which killed a senior general of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and six other Iranian military advisers, as well as Syrians, is a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Israel itself has squawked when its embassies and embassy personnel have been targeted. In 1982, well after the government had decided to attack Lebanon, it trotted out an ex post facto justification that the Israeli ambassador in London had been shot.
Among the dead at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, in addition were Brig. Gen Mohammad Reza Zahedi, was his deputy, Brig Gen Mohammad Hadi Haji-Rahimi.
It seems likely that the Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu is attempting to draw Iran into a war. If Iran retaliated directly, the Biden administration would feel the necessity of coming to Israel’s aid. Provoking an Iranian assault is the best way for Netanyahu to outflank the increasingly critical US government. His freedom of action may be circumscribed if the chorus of criticism in the Democratic Party and the American public finally sways President Joe Biden to do more than mouth “thoughts and prayers,” as though the Israeli genocide in Gaza were a school shooting.
Iran has exercised restraint in the face of the massive and brutal Israeli total war on the civilians of Gaza, as I argued recently at Tomdispatch.com . Tehran appears to have restrained the Iraqi Shiite militias that targeted US troops, killing 3 in Jordan. It has also advised Hezbollah in southern Lebanon not to risk an all-out war with Israel, though the Netanyahu government appears to be spoiling for one.
The Israeli attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus could undo that restraint.
Analysis: Why a missile strike on an Iranian embassy?ーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS Video with Professor Tanaka Koichiro.
The influential editor of Kayhan newspaper, Husain Shariatmadar, who was appointed to the position by the country’s clerical “august leader” Ali Khamenei, urged an eye for an eye. He wrote,
“Contrary to the laws known in international law, the Zionist regime has launched a military attack on the Iranian consulate in a third country, therefore, based on the principle of “retaliation”, it is an absolute right to attack the embassies and consulates of the artificial Israeli regime in any other country.”
BBC Monitoring pointed out that some Iranians on social media singled out the Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan for attack. Azerbaijan’s willingness to cooperate with Israel against Iran has long rankled in Tehran. It says that some hard liners worry that if Iran takes the attack lying down, it undermines deterrence against Israeli aggression.
Aside from possible Iranian retaliation against Israel embassies, it seems unlikely to me that even these brazen assassinations will change the Iranian calculus. They believe that slow and steady wins the race and that revenge is a dish best served cold.
The Iranian leadership will not blithely put itself in a position where the it has to try to take on Israel and US in a conventional war. It has been goaded but hasn’t lost its common sense.
So Netanyahu’s dream of a war with Iran that draws the US back in seems far-fetched. It is not out of the question, however, given Biden’s knee-jerk support for the far right Likud Party.