Will Iran really try to assassinate Trump?
But the threat should be taken very seriously: the Islamic Republic has a long track record for taking vicious vengeance on those it deems to have harmed it. In 1988, the American warship USS Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iranian airbus, killing all 290 people on board. A few months later, in December 1988, a Pan Am flight en route from London to New York was brought down by a bomb over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. All 270 people on board from 21 different nationalities died.
Although a Libyan official working for the now fallen Gaddafi regime was convicted and jailed for that crime, many people, including bereaved relatives of the Lockerbie victims, believe that the real culprits behind the bombing were the Iranians, taking a savage revenge for the Vincennes tragedy.
The concept of vengeance plays a large role in cultures across the whole Middle East. For example, in April 1993, President George Bush senior was visiting Kuwait on the first anniversary of the liberation of that Emirate from Iraqi occupation in the first Gulf War. An American-led coalition had repelled an invasion of Kuwait by Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein but left his regime in place.
On the eve of Bush's arrival, Kuwaiti security police arrested 14 men and accused them of being Iraqi agents plotting to blow up the president with a bomb planted in a Toyota Land cruiser. Anger about that plot against his father is thought to have been a major motive prompting President George W. Bush's disastrous decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam ten years later in 1993, ostensibly as punishment for 9/11, an atrocity for which Iraq bore no responsibility.
Iranian agents have been accused of plotting to kill John Bolton, who briefly served as Trump's national security advisor during his first term in the White House, and is a foreign policy hawk who has called for the downfall of the Ayatollahs' regime. Tehran has a well documented record for fomenting terror against the West over many years; there is no reason why they should stop now.
Indeed, by carrying out US bunker busting strikes against two of Iran's buried nuclear facilities, Trump has handed the Mullahs an added grievance to avenge. The president may yet come to regret imposing a premature ceasefire to stop last month's 12 day war before Israel had finished the job of destroying Tehran's terrorist regime.The beast has been wounded but not killed, and in that injured and resentful state is more dangerous to the world than ever.
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