How worried should we be?
News report from slightly more neutral source:
Iran’s top nuclear scientist shot dead near Tehran | Iran’s nuclear programme | The Guardian
From the above linked article:
“We will strike as thunder at the killers of this oppressed martyr and will make them regret their action,” tweeted Hossein Dehghan, a military commander.
They’re not going to do a damn thing except use bad hyperbole and order Hamas or Hezbollah to do their dirty work for them. Also, lightning strikes cause damage; thunder just makes a lot of loud noise.
You mean, just like they totally didn’t blow up that massive Saudi oil refinery last year?
One of the few nice things about having an egomaniac for President is that we can be absolutely sure the US had nothing to do with this. Trump would have been bragging about it by now.
He also said “we will descend like lightning”. Probably should’ve said “strike like lightning, descend like thunder”. “Float like a butterfly”, sting like a bee" isn’t apocalyptic enough.
From the Guardian article:
“Israel will face accusations that it is using the final weeks of the Trump administration to try to provoke Iran in the hope of closing off any chance of reconciliation between Tehran and the incoming US administration led by Joe Biden.”
Well OK, a slightly more neutral source. 
One commentator on CNN today was saying Israel probably could not have done this without some level of logistical support from the US. And Chump did have to be talked out of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear sites a week or two ago. Maybe he wants to start a war that Biden will have to deal with.
That seems like utter BS. Israel has one of the best intelligence forces in the world, certainly relative to their size. They’ve pulled off plenty of operations like this one without involving the US, including going against US interests and taking out people the US would have preferred were left alone.
Below is what I said about the possibility of a “decisive strike” or Iran’s nuclear facilities in the Trump Coup thread.
TL;DR:
A) Bibi doesn’t give a flying fuck about Trump beyond what Trump can do to forward his own political ambitions in Israel. He is in hot water internally and sucking up to Trump doesn’t impact this one bit (and actually Bibi’s opponents dislike Trump and will be more eager to oust Bibi the more he sucks up to Trump)
B) A “decisive strike” or Iran’s nuclear program, as was suggested in that thread, is impossible. The Iranians learned from the Israeli bombing of the Iraqi core. Their program is distributed throughout multiple, underground, hardened facilities.
So in light of these new events, we learn a few things:
A) no “decisive strike” was attempted because it would not have worked anyways.
B) Netanyahu IS trying something, because as stated the internal perception in Israel is that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat to Israel. So as predicted it is in his interest to be seen slowing down the Iranian program.
C) The Israeli newspapers are reporting that Israeli embassies abroad are entering a higher level of readiness because of the fear of an Iranian response, but also point out the strategic goal in enacting this plan right now.
With all this in mind - here is how I see things:
- Trump is on his way out. When Joe Biden is in, lifting the sanctions and restoring a nuclear deal is back on the table.
- Iran has been heavy hit by the sanctions and will want to work with Biden to remove them
- Retaliation against Israel will hurt the Iranians at the negotiation table. Since Iran has a strong interest in getting to the table from a position of strength, it is likely they will exercise restraint.
- Israel and Bibi don’t have all that much faith in the nuclear deal. The perception is that while it did help make Iran behave somewhat, they’ve continued advancing their nuclear program the whole time, and so the deal isn’t the end all be all.
- However, if the head scientist of Iran’s program is killed, that would set them back further. So if they can be made to suffer a major setback in their progress before sitting back down at the negotiation table, that could REALLY slow them down - a great win from Netanyahu’s perspective.
Is it possible Trump or the current US admin was involved? Definitely - but I just don’t see what’s in it for Trump. I doubt he genuinely cares about Bibi any more than Bibi cares about him. And if he doesn’t get to claim the credit, what use to him is helping the Israelis?
An article today about the actual assassination:
I had to laugh when I read this part:
One report published Sunday from Fars News said Fakhrizadeh was traveling with his wife Friday in a bulletproof car, alongside three security personnel vehicles, when he heard what sounded like bullets hitting a vehicle, and he exited the car to determine what had happened. When he exited the vehicle, a remote-controlled machine gun opened fire from a Nissan stopped about 150 meters (164 yards) from Fakhrizadeh’s car, Fars News said.
I have it on good authority that you have to be pretty smart to be a nuclear scientist. I’m not nearly that smart, but holy shit, even I know that if I’m such a target that I have to travel in a bulletproof vehicle, I should probably not get out of it if I’m hearing something that sounds like bullets hitting a vehicle.
Remote controlled machine gun? Someone’s a Breaking Bad fan.
I have to say, I would expect a physicist to be familiar with Heisenberg.
It’s not unknown for someone to be brilliant in their own narrow field and devoid of common sense in other areas.
It’s like something out of Mission: Impossible.
That’s not at all fucking terrifying.
From the snip of the CNN article @Machine_Elf cited:
Per the pic in this article
the location was on the outskirts of a town, with some buildings nearby and also some open land.
Hosing away with a machine gun, especially a remote controlled one, at a range of 150m says whoever was behind this was not very concerned about possible collateral damage to other buildings, vehicles, and people nearby. Better this site than deep in town, but still and all this hit was messy by design.
It should not go unconsidered that Israelis are not the only other nation that has this capability or an interest in seeing the Iranian nuclear program crippled.
And yet it appears that no collateral damage is being reported (except for the bodyguard, depending on whether you consider the bodyguard of the assassination target “collateral” or not…) 
I would have said “The Jackal”:
The FBI…deduce that the Jackal plans to use a long-range, high cyclic rate weapon, i.e. a heavy machine gun for the assassination.
.
.
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During the opening of a hospital for which the First Lady is giving a speech, The Jackal plans to shoot her via remote control.
Yeah, I’m having a hard time believing that the organizations that pulled off all these things that we know about would have some trouble killing an Iranian scientist.
Nope, the bodyguard is not collateral; he’s part of the target set as are the other vehicles in the convoy. Combat is like that.
Don’t misread my point as being something like “Whoever did this is a big meany who recklessly killed an innocent man.” Far from it. I’m speaking simply to ambush tactics and to what the apparent attitude to possible collateral damage says about the importance the hitter’s employer put on successfully taking out the hittee.
A bunch of rounds would have gone downrange. Some of which are presumably stuck in the walls of whatever buildings or compounds are the backstop. In general in road ambushes you want to fire down the length of the road rather than across it. Much less likelihood of missing your target because the angle rate across your field of fire is less. But given that roads generally have other traffic, and that the hitter has no control over how much traffic is nearby when the hittee unwittingly passes the ambush point, designing your ambush to fire down a road is choosing to fire into a potentially large crowd of other vehicles.
OTOH, we don’t know how many times this guy drove past an ambush that held its fire precisely for collateral damage reasons. OTOOH, given the risks of doing something as blatant as setting up a machine gun ambush in a pretty thoroughly authoritarian country, I’m going to be they didn’t skip many opportunities, and most likely skipped zero.
And of course, any concern about collateral damage is not about the innocent lives possibly sacrificed. It’s about the incremental political blowback triggered by those lives. Shooting up the target will get a certain amount of international criticism, some of it accompanied by sotto voce "Good job!"s. Doing the same thing and also taking out a school bus full of kids will get a lot more open condemnation and a lot fewer "Good job!"s.
That is all.