Exactly what I was thinking, but with self-driving car hardware becoming more common, it’s only a matter of time until they are weaponized as drone car bombs.
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With all the other details provided in the story, a blockage in the road would be a pretty important one to omit. But yeah, who really knows…? Certainly not us.
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Libya didn’t agree to take the fall for the Lockerbie bombing, they were under heavy international sanctions and had to confess and pay billons of dollars to be able to trade with the rest of the world. It was traditional blackmail.The publically available evidence against Libya is very weak, but neither is there any good evdence against Iran. Both had good motives, though.
Evidence in the other two cases also seems rather weak. Even if you accept the accusations against Hezbollah, they have their own reasons to hate Iran after the Israeli occupations of Lebanon.
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The man travels in a large armored caravan of security personnel. He knows Israel regularly hunts down nuclear scientists. He may not know the way he’s being targeted, but he certainly knows he’s a target.
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To add to this, the article says:
Following the gunfire, the Nissan exploded, the news agency reported, adding the attack lasted three minutes.
So if he’d stayed in the car, he could have been mocked with, “Heh, imagine choosing to sit right next to a tank of gasoline while a machine gun is shooting at it.” Sometimes there are just no good options, not even for engineers.
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Just to make this clear: the Nissan, here, is the car the machine gun was in, not the bullet-proof car of the motorcade.
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The machine gun was neither sentient nor flying but I agree that especially when it comes to Iran there is an odd blind spot in the American psyche that treats Iranians as “getting what they deserve” no matter how horrible the attack.
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I also find the victim blaming and the mentality that government nuclear scientists deserve to die super gross.
But it’s worth noting that modern internal combustion driven vehicles have baffled fuel tanks that while they can certainly catch fire and burn up, are specifically designed not to burn explosively. That’s why, while I enjoy the movie The Jackal that @Doctor_Faustus link to above, shooting a leak in the fuel tank and then shooting the gasoline that leaked out shouldn’t explode like that (unless of course the titular assassin rigged it with unstable explosives like the Nissan in this actual assassination.
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Yep; that’s called “destroying the evidence”. The operator was probably watching from an undisclosed location with good sight lines to the kill box.
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I (obviously) lack the detailed intelligence and unsavory experience that goes in to planning a successful hit against a guarded target in hostile territory; but I’m really surprised that all accounts so far point to an attack with relatively light guns(remote-controlled vehicle mounted guns are a new detail; but previously it was an unknown number of gunmen); rather than something more obviously suited to dealing with vehicles and less likely to leave operatives dead or captured in the shoot-out with the bodyguards and whatever security forces are quickest to respond.
As we learned so painfully in Iraq and Afghanistan, relatively unsophisticated explosives are readily concealed and, with appropriate design (EFPs seem to be the most prominent) can be a menace to pretty much anything short of a main battle tank, and even those don’t enjoy impunity.
I have to wonder what the consideration was that led to this; rather than to either an IED trap or a remote-triggered anti-armor missile concealed near the road.
Small arms seem really, really, risky in terms of time required to guarantee a kill against someone in an armored car(and, indeed, this report is that he didn’t suffer his full injuries until he left the car; and other reports are that he died in-hospital rather than on-scene); and this isn’t a situation where you can just assume that you’ll have ample time; he had bodyguards with him and the response time of local police and/or military units probably isn’t all that long.
Some factor I’m not thinking of? Was there a hope that they might be able to get him alive with killing him being the secondary option?
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Er… dude was “in a bulletproof car, alongside three security personnel vehicles”, so he probably had at least a small expectation he might be shot at.
He was a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at one point. I suppose this would be akin to the Russians trying to assassinate Warner von Braun during the Space Race.
Re: the attack - there are conflicting reports on what happened. Another version has the exploding Nissan to block the convoy, and then an ambush by gun men. So the line about him getting out to check might be false.
Either way… its one of those pros and cons things for me… not sure Israel or who ever did it should be doing assassinations, but on the other hand, their nuclear program poses a potential threat to their power/existence and is understandable.
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I dont find that blind spot odd. For U.S. Americans, decades of propaganda have converted Iranians into another group of “backwards Muslims,” thereby dehumanizing them into, basically, creatures who should not be squatting on “our” oil.
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Maybe the assassin(s) didn’t want to cause a lot of collateral damage and kill people other than their target? Besides, other than the obvious ethical benefits of not killing people that you don’t think need to be killed, there are any number of geopolitical reasons not to create a bloodbath. And the perpetrators may have wanted to send a message about how sophisticated their abilities are.
But they dared to checks notes be pissed off that we overthrew their government and continue to intervene in their affairs… /s
I think we can just shorten that to murder.
They have shown little concern for the lives of people in that region for years now. Why would they all of a sudden start caring if a few Muslims are accidentally killed? If years of Middle East policy has taught us anything, it should be that western governments do not care about the lives of people there, unless it somehow benefits them to care.
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As I said in the post, there are geopolitical reasons. For example, it’s a lot easier for allies of the aggressor country to pretend that this wasn’t an all-out act of war if they didn’t kill dozens of random bystanders with a smart bomb or roadside IED.
Edit to add: what’s your theory as to why they didn’t just take out the whole convoy with a roadside bomb or something similar?
I definitely agree with Mindy here, they didn’t give a damn about the Iranians, they just wanted to send a message, and possibly have eyewitness reports of the guy being killed.
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The word ‘drone’ is not a shorthand term for ‘radio-controlled’.
Duh. Drones are pheromone controlled.
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This is security’s stupidity, not engineer’s disease. At anything suspicious, their FIRST responsibility is the call for help and get their principal away from the threat. Allowing him to exit the vehicle at all makes them responsible.
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For moral purposes, no argument here; but for “why would they do it that way?” purposes the context and constraints of one’s murder are pretty important; and that’s what was puzzling me.
My only real question, RE: the murder, is why it happened so relatively late; but the means chosen given the constraints under which it was carried out seem odd.
