, Columnist
On the Iran Nuclear Deal, Israel Gets a Vote
The assassination of the Iranian regime’s top nuclear scientist was intended to send a message.
Reports of the impact of his death are greatly exaggerated.
Photographer: ATTA KENARE/AFPThis article is for subscribers only.
When asked when the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan might end, retired General David Petraeus would deploy a useful quip. “The enemy gets a vote,” he would say, meaning that both sides need to agree to stop fighting.
There is a corollary to Petraeus’s adage that is relevant not to war but to peace agreements: The allies get a vote, too. In the context of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, the allies include Israel, which was not a party to the deal but is almost certainly responsible for last weekend’s assassination of Iran’s top nuclear weapons scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.