Tinker, Tailor, Soldier… Iranian Scientist?
In case you haven’t heard, another Iranian scientist who was perhaps working on nuclear issues has been killed in Tehran. Reuters reports-
TEHRAN, Jan 12 (Reuters) - An Iranian nuclear scientist was blown up in his car by a motorbike hitman, prompting Tehran to blame Israeli and U.S. agents but insist the killing would not derail a nuclear programme that has raised fears of war and threatened world oil supplies.
The fifth daylight attack on technical experts in two years, the magnetic bomb delivered a targeted blast to the door of 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan’s car during Wednesday’s morning rush-hour. The chemical engineer’s driver also died, Iranian media said, and a passer-by was slightly hurt.
Israel, whose military chief said on Tuesday that Iran could expect to suffer more mysterious mishaps, declined comment. The White House, struggling for Chinese and Russian help on economic sanctions, denied any U.S. role and condemned the attack.
While Israeli or Western involvement seemed eminently plausible to independent analysts, a role for local Iranian factions or other regional interests engaged in a deadly shadow war of bluff and sabotage could not be ruled out.
That last paragraph, which grudgingly admits that there are at least two competing explanations, is to Reuters’ credit. All of the pundits I’ve heard discussing this homicide have simply assumed that Israel is responsible, given the circumstantial evidence: targeted assassinations fit Israel’s modus operandi, and no doubt there is a continuous covert war ongoing between Israel and at least Iran’s proxies. But, having seen Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy recently, I can’t help but wonder…
Normally I deride conspiratorial thinking, but in this case I’ll make an exception, just to make a point. Has it struck anyone as odd that the Israeli defense minister apparently telegraphed this killing the day before it happened? Might it not have given the Iranians (or some Iranian faction) the opportunity to kill Ahmadi-Roshan and conveniently blame it on Israel? But why, you ask, would the Iranians kill their own scientist? Well, who knows? Maybe they suspected him of spying for Israel, the U.S., or some Sunni Arab state (the Sunnis fear the Iranian mullahs almost as much as Israel does). Or maybe he was not particularly valuable to them, and they killed him just for the sake of further driving a wedge between Israel and the West? Almost all the pundits, after suggesting that Israel was the likely culprit, go on to point out that a strategy of killing scientists, besides being morally reprehensible, is hardly likely to slow down Iran’s nuclear program much, and it gives Iran a huge propaganda advantage. But they fail to draw the obvious conclusion: that maybe - just maybe - Israel didn’t do it.
So we have at least two competing, somewhat plausible (and somewhat implausible) possibilities here, but so far no firm evidence for either of them. My point is not that we should believe that the Iranians did it; that would be nearly as irrational as, say, the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Rather, it is that we should feel comfortable putting neither forth as even “probable”, at least without further information.
Could someone please tell the pundits that?
