But to really see what’s going on here, let’s look at how a very recent, very similar assassination plot was discussed. That occurred in October when the U.S. accused Iran’s Quds Forces of recruiting a failed used car salesman in Texas to hire Mexican drug cartels to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Let’s put to side the intrinsic ridiculousness of the accusation and assume it to be true. That plot did not involve anything remotely approaching indiscriminate killing; it was very specifically targeted at one person: the Saudi Ambassador, a government official of a country which has extreme tensions with Iran. Indeed, the targeted Ambassador is an official in a government that has engaged in all sorts of acts of war and is even linked to an actual Terrorist plot: the 9/11 attacks. As Jonathan Schwarz put it at the time: “The funny thing is, I’d bet the Saudi ambassador to the US has closer ‘ties’ to Al Qaeda than 90% of the people we’ve killed with drones.”
Nonetheless, when that plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador was “revealed,” virtually every last media outlet — and government official — branded it “Terrorism.” It was just reflexively described that way. And I never heard anyone — anywhere — object to the use of that term on the ground that targeted assassinations aren’t Terrorism, or on any other ground. One of the nation’s alleged leading Iran experts, Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institution, immediately announced that the plot, if proven, “would represent a major escalation of Iranian terrorist operations against the United States.” And that claim was repeated in almost every major media outlet:
