Following the assassination last week of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the chief scientist of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear-weapons program, came a predictable chorus of condemnation from European diplomats and American commentators, often ignoring the fact that Fakhrizadeh was not a civilian but a brigadier general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a designated terrorist organization. Richard Kemp explains why criticisms of Fakhrizadeh’s killing—widely thought to have been an Israeli covert operation—are nonsensical. Kemp pays particular attention to the arguments set forth by the former CIA director John O. Brennan:

Brennan says targeted killings are lawful against illegitimate combatants, i.e. terrorist operatives, but not officials of sovereign states in peacetime, with the implication that in this case the perpetrators of the killing were not at war with Iran.

This is to misunderstand the reality that war can no longer be seen as defined periods of hostilities characterized by sweeping movements of armor across the plains, grand naval battles, and dogfights in the skies. Instead, the lines between peace and war have been intentionally blurred by countries such as Iran and Russia, often using surrogates to strike their enemies, as well as by non-state actors such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda, with unprecedented capacity for global violence.

Iran has prosecuted a long-term concerted war against Israel with the declared intention of eliminating the Jewish state. It has funded and directed attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, inside Israel and against Israeli citizens and government officials beyond the region. It has built an extensive missile complex in southern Lebanon, deploying many thousands of rockets pointed at Israel. It has sought to develop a base of operations in Syria from which to attack Israel. It has fomented, funded, and armed an insurgency in Yemen from which to conduct a proxy war against Saudi Arabia. It has also launched drone and cruise-missile attacks against Saudi oil facilities.

Those that argue against [current American and Israeli efforts to contain the Islamic Republic] fail to understand the danger that a nuclear-armed Iran presents to the region and the world, wrongly believe that the program can be halted by diplomatic means, or are happy with the idea of a nuclear-armed fanatical dictatorship.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.