An ‘easy target’? Killing the ayatollah would be almost unprecedented

You have to search hard to find any examples of monarchs, presidents, prime ministers or generals ordering the deaths of their opposite numbers. In 1580 Philip II of Spain (he of the Armada) put a bounty of 25,000 crowns on the head of the Dutch rebel prince William the Silent; the man who shot and killed William four years later didn't get to collect the reward. Not in this world at any rate.

A century earlier, Pope Sixtus IV – ruler of the Papal States – connived at an attempt on the life of Lorenzo the Magnificent, de facto ruler of Florence. But he did it coyly; when approached for his support for the conspiracy he told the would-be assassins that he couldn’t sanction killing, but that he could see what a good thing it would be if Lorenzo was bumped off and that he might be hard pressed to condemn the men who did it. In the event the attempt failed; Leonardo drew one of the would-be assassins hanging in Florence’s main square.

Reigning monarchs did not kill brother and sister monarchs. Elizabeth I’s execution of Mary Queen of Scots, even 20 years after Mary’s abdication from the Scottish throne, was seen as a shocking act of queen-on-queen violence and condemned across Europe. Towards the end of the the second world war there was a desultory British plot against the life of Adolf Hitler, Operation Foxley. This consisted of a few rather speculative ideas on how to snipe the Führer on an Alpine stroll or poison the water supply in his personal train. The idea was abandoned because the war was ending anyway.

In 1963 the immediate concern of the new US president, Lyndon B Johnson, following the assassination of John F Kennedy was that the Russians or Cubans might be responsible. He fretted that such a conclusion might “lead to a war that could kill 40 million Americans in an hour”. The Warren Commission was partly set up to discount this possibility.

Ironically American presidents were already being accused of complicity in the murders of – or plots against – various inconvenient foreign leaders: Diem of South Vietnam, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and, most notably, Fidel Castro. In the latter case, the CIA certainly did plan to murder the Cuban leader, but, as the Senate’s Church Committee, led by Senator Frank Church, concluded in the mid-1970s: “The record establishes that the presidents [Eisenhower and Kennedy] were not made aware of the plots until after the fact.”

After the 2022 invasion, Ukraine claimed that there had been numerous Russian attempts to murder President Zelensky – an act that could hardly have been contemplated without the knowledge of Vladimir Putin. It's impossible to test these claims fully, but these claims have a plausible ring to them. And now we have talk of the president of the US and the prime minister of Israel exchanging views concerning the assassination of the supreme leader of Iran.

Even Benjamin Netanyahu, however, will be aware of the many inhibitions that have governed even the most intemperate leaders throughout history: If it’s legitimate for you to do it to them, then it's open season on you; you don’t know that whoever replaces them won’t be far worse; that a resulting leadership vacuum and social chaos might not engulf your interests too; that dead leaders can’t negotiate; that – like Obi-Wan Kenobi – the martyred leader might not be far more powerful in death than in life. That your target is 86 and God may do your work for you.

Photograph by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images, Iranian Leader Press Office/Anadolu via Getty Images, Netflix