In December, Mohammed al-Shamrani, a Saudi military pilot participating in a training exercise at the U.S. naval base in Pensacola, Florida, shot three American servicemen and injured eight others. According to information recently released by the Justice Department, the shooter was an al-Qaeda operative who had been planning the attack for some time. The Pentagon has responded with an effort to improve its vetting procedures for participants in such joint exercises, but John Hannah and Varsha Koduvayur argue that more must be done:

Beyond the narrow issue of vetting lies the broader problem of Saudi Arabia’s historical role as proselytizer-in-chief of Wahhabism, the ultra-conservative religious ideology that has set so many young Muslims on the path toward violent jihad. To his credit, Saudi Arabia’s de-facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, declared in 2017 that the kingdom was returning to “moderate Islam.” Since then, he’s declawed the dreaded religious police, jailed radical preachers, and implemented far-reaching reforms, including all-important efforts to empower women. By most accounts, the Saudis are now largely out of the business of pouring resources into spreading Wahhabism abroad as well.

But the Frankenstein’s monster that they did so much to create lives on. That’s why it’s important that the Saudis be pressed to do everything in their power to help fight the threats that their previous policies left behind. The fact is that Shamrani was a teenager in high school when he succumbed to al-Qaeda’s siren song, imbibing the hate-speech that still lingers today in Saudi textbooks—more than a decade after Riyadh first promised Washington that they’d be excised. Alas, as documented in a recent report, the kingdom’s texts still truck in hate-filled passages that refer to Jews and Christians as “the enemies of Islam and its people.”

[The Saudi response to the Pensacola shooting] represents a dramatic reversal from the denial and deflection that characterized the Saudi reaction to 9/11. But it’s important that the Saudis follow through with action. There’s no doubt a lot they could learn by conducting a deep dive into Shamrani’s life. . . . Indeed, rather than having to wait four months for FBI engineers to hack Shamrani’s phones to discover his al-Qaeda connections, one might have hoped that a vigorous Saudi investigation would have already uncovered such links.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.