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.

On the same day the cease-fire went into effect along the Israel-Lebanon border, rebel forces launched an unexpected offensive, and within a few days captured much of Aleppo. This lightening advance originated in the northwestern part of the country, which has been relatively quiet over the past four years, since Bashar al-Assad effectively gave up on restoring control over the remaining rebel enclaves in the area. The fighting comes at an inopportune moment for the powers that Damascus has called on for help in the past: Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and Hizballah has been shattered.

But the situation is extremely complex. David Wurmser points to the dangers that lie ahead:

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. . . . However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. navigating the new reality taking shape.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of Islamic State is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS—a descendant of Nusra Front led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of al-Qaeda’s system and cobbled together of IS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey.