With Friends Like These…

US officials are leaking that Israel plotted to kill the Iranian negotiators:

U.S. officials believed that Israel might have been plotting to kill Iran’s top negotiators while Washington was engaged with Tehran in delicate talks this spring to reach an interim peace deal, according to current and former American officials.

Killing senior Iranian leaders had been part of Israel’s strategy from the start of the war. But American concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials — Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament — spiked during delicate cease-fire negotiations that began in April.

Fearful that an Israeli assassination effort would doom the negotiations, the United States, according to some of the officials, went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility Israel could target the two officials.

U.S. officials acknowledged that during the intense phase of the war, Mr. Araghchi and Mr. Ghalibaf, as senior government officials, could have been legitimate targets for Israel, which was intent on toppling Iran’s hard-line government. But after the negotiations started in earnest in April, American officials believed that any attempt to kill the Iranian leaders would end the talks and reignite the fighting.

Why leak this now? Concern about the health of the current Iranian negotiating team? Stronger justification against GOP hawks for cutting Israel out of the negotiations? I’m getting the sense that they’ve decided that they’re going to pin the blame for the war on Israel, which isn’t exactly wrong but obviously isn’t faintly right, either. That’ll appeal to the genuinely anti-semitic factions of MAGA while also creating coalition problems for the Democrats.

… btw this is a good primer on law, policy, and practice with respect to “decapitation” strikes:

The trouble with doctrine is that it generalizes. Whatever is permissible for Israel and the United States in 2026 is available to any state with the reach to attempt it in 2027. Several categories of precedent now sit on the shelf.

Heads of state are now on the table. If Khamenei was a lawful target by virtue of being commander in chief, then any head of state’s constitutional command role becomes a sufficient predicate in any armed conflict. That is not a hypothetical concern. Washington has long benefited from a de facto norm against targeting heads of state in armed conflict. That norm was never codified in treaty law; its force derived from reciprocal restraint. By striking Khamenei, the United States did not merely break the norm—it demonstrates that a state with sufficient capability and sufficient justification will act on it. Adversaries who were already calculating the value of U.S. leadership as a target will not miss the lesson. A leader who believes he has been placed on a potential strike list does not wait to confirm the threat is credible. He acts first. Putin, whose command authority now sits on the same legal terrain Washington just declared targetable, has every incentive to recalibrate. So does Beijing.

Targeting envoys amid negotiations is also now fair game. Larijani’s killing opens a precedent that would have been unthinkable in the Cold War. The norm against killing the official with whom one is negotiating has not been formally renounced, but it has been operationally breached at a high level. Any U.S. diplomat heading into a future high-stakes negotiation with a hostile state now operates under a thinner shield.

And there is now a precedent for pre-delegating kill authority across an adversary’s cabinet. The Katz authorization established that a defense minister can, by his own declaration, place the senior officials of an adversary state on a standing kill list. Procedure is not a small thing: The political friction case-by-case approval generates is itself part of the constraint on what gets done. Strip procedure out and decapitation drifts from grave sovereign decision toward routine operational work. The architecture for a future U.S. president to delegate similar authority to a combatant commander is now in place.