For decades, the United States moved from covert assassination plots to openly embracing assassination or targeted killing as policy. Now, in its war with Iran, that evolution is reaching its most dangerous phase.

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

On March 17th and 18th, the United States and Israelassassinatedthree senior Iranian government officials in targeted air strikes: Ali Larijani, the secretary of Irans Supreme National Security Council; Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of Irans Basij domestic security forces; and Esmaeil Khatib, Irans Intelligence Minister.

The missile that killed Ali Larijani also demolished an apartment building and killed more than a hundredpeople. Israeli defense minister Israel Katz announced that Israeli forces were now authorized to assassinate any senior Iranian official whenever they can, and they have continued to do so, bringing the number of Iranian officialsassassinatedin the past year to at least seventy.

The assassination of Ali Larijani is a blow to the already fraught chances for a negotiated peace between Iran and the United States and Israel. Ali Larijani was an experienced, pragmatic senior official who had played leading roles in negotiations with the US and other world powers since 2005.

Larijanihad degrees in math and computer science, attended the revered seminary in Qom, and fought in the Iran-Iraq War, rising to the rank of brigadier-general in Irans Revolutionary Guard Corps. After the war, he managed Irans state broadcasting service, earned a doctorate in Western Philosophy from the University of Tehran, and wrote three books on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, before entering politics and government in 2005. In 2024, Larijani wrote a book on political philosophy, titledReason and Tranquility in Governance.

If the U.S. hoped to make peace and restore relations with Iran, Ali Larijani would have been a potential negotiating partner. The decision to assassinate Larijani two weeks into this warsuggeststhat US leaders had no interest in negotiations.

Another possibility is even more chilling. Israeli leaders may have viewed Larijani as a potential off-ramp and deliberately eliminated him to ensure the war continues.

That killing was followed by an unprecedented Israeli strike on Irans South Pars gas fieldthe largest in the world and a shared resource with Qatar. Iran retaliated with missile strikes on energy infrastructure across Israel and the Gulf. In Qatar, damage to the Ras Laffan LNG terminalone of the worlds most critical gas hubscould take years and billions of dollars to repair.

As global energy markets reeled, U.S. officialsconfirmedtoThe Wall Street Journalthat the South Pars attack had been coordinated with Washington, contradicting denials from President Trump.

The pattern is unmistakable. As one analystput it, Israel appears to be escalating deliberatelyeliminating moderates within Iran while striking critical infrastructureto provoke a wider regional war that leaves no room for de-escalation.

Analysts debate how much Israel is driving this escalation and how much U.S. officials are fully aligned. But an imperial power cannot outsource responsibility. As Harry Trumans famous desk sign declared:The buck stops here.

In its alliance with Israel, the United States has normalized the systematic assassination of foreign leadersfromPalestine, andLebanon, toSyria,Yemenand now Iran. This is not new. In 2020, President Trumporderedthe drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of Iraqs Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that had joined with US forces to fight the Islamic State.

Yet assassination is explicitly prohibited under U.S. law.Executive Order 12333states clearly: No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.

That prohibition emerged from the Church Committeesinvestigationinto U.S. assassination plots against Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and General Ren Schneider in Chile.

It also reflects long-standing international law, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions.

After 9/11, however, the United States systematically ignored or circumvented many of the constraints of U.S. and international law.As U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq led to widespread armed resistance, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began arguing for what he calledmanhunts,to deploy US special operations forces to hunt down suspected resistance leaders and kill them, as Israeli undercover units already did in occupied Palestine.

General Charles Holland, the head of US Special Operations Command, refused to authorize such operations, but his retirement in October 2003 allowed Rumsfeld to appoint more like-minded officials to senior positions and bring in the Israelis to train Americandeath squadsin Israel and North Carolina.

Dead men tell no tales, as the saying goes, and there has been almost no accountability for the resulting killings, which systematically killed thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two senior UScommanderstold theWashington Postthat only about 50% of kill or capture raids by Joint Special Operations Command targeted the right or intended people or homes, while troops involved in these raids said that that assessment greatly overstated their rate of success.

Drone warfare accelerated the trend. Under President Obama, strikesexpandedtenfold, turning targeted killing into a central pillar of U.S. policy. By 2011,night raidsin Afghanistan numbered in the hundreds each month,alienatingthe Afghan people and ultimately ensuring the defeat of the US occupation and the return of the Taliban.

Now US and Israeli forces are using air and drone strikes to assassinate Iranian leaders and kill civilians in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. The language of restraint has disappeared, replaced by open celebration oflethalityand threats of further war crimes.

What was once covert, controversial, and constrained is now overt, normalized, and defended.

The cumulative effect is stark: the United States has made assassination and extrajudicial killing routine instruments of policy, as it tramples the UN Charter, the Hague and Geneva Conventions and its own lawsundermining the very international legal order it claims to uphold.

Meanwhile, a multipolar world is emerging, driven largely by nations of the Global South. But the transition to a peaceful, sustainable world is far from certain. The greatest obstacle in its way is the continued reliance of the United States on the illegal threat and use of military force and economic coercion to try to maintain its own dominance.

Iran exercised restraint for decades in the face of false accusations regarding nuclear weapons, maximum pressure economic sanctions and escalating threats and attacks by the US and Israel. It quietly built up its defenses and military strategies for the day that it would need them, and that day has come.

The failure of the international community to stop successive U.S. wars of aggression poses an existential threat to the UN Charter and the postWorld War II order. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned at theCELACSummit on March 21: The more serious humanitys problems become, the fewer tools we have for collective action. And that path leads only to barbarism.

The United States now faces a stark choice: to continue down this path of lawless violence, or to turn the page on our nations life of international crime and finally, genuinely embrace diplomacy and peaceful coexistence with our neighbors, as the UN Charter requires.

For Americansand for the worldthat choice is becoming a matter of survival.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors ofWar In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.

Medea Benjaminis the cofounder ofCODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, includingInside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Daviesis an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author ofBlood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

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