In her address to the UN General Assembly two weeks ago, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina declared that her government “will continue tirelessly seeking the truth and justice in the AMIA case”—referring to Hizballah’s 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center. Not only is this statement patently false, writes Clifford May, but Kirchner’s government seems to be collaborating with Iran to cover up the latter’s role in the attack:

[The story of] the AMIA bombing and the murder of [the state-appointed prosecutor investigating the case, Alberto] Nisman, started with . . . an agreement Argentina made in the late 1980s to provide Iran with nuclear technology and assistance. Eventually, under pressure from the United States, the Argentine government did not give Iran’s revolutionary theocrats what they wanted.

One plausible theory—in essence, Nisman’s theory—is that the attack was Iran’s way of sending a message and a warning: “This time we kill Argentine Jews. Disappoint us again and who knows what our targets will be?”

While Kirchner originally supported Nisman’s efforts to uncover Iranian complicity in the bombing, by 2013 she had changed her tune and Nisman eventually came to believe that she herself was involved in the cover-up. May continues:

[I]t’s at least possible [Kirchner] came to believe that refusing to shield Iran was simply too dangerous. Perhaps she rationalized, too, that [whatever understanding she came to with Iran] was the best deal she could get and that even a bad deal was preferable to no deal—much as President Obama came to view the agreement he cut giving Iran’s rulers a long list of concessions in exchange for their vague promise to delay a nuclear-weapons program whose existence they refuse to acknowledge.

Whatever the reasons, Mrs. Kirchner’s Faustian bargain necessitated abandoning both the AMIA victims and Nisman. Did it necessitate something even worse? That remains an unsolved murder mystery.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].