Who killed Hamas’s leader? Regional stability depends on the answer.

History may or may not repeat and may or may not even rhyme. But certain events can only be ignored or dismissed with great peril.

Sixty years ago this month, the Congress recklessly and foolishly raced to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, with just two dissenting votes in the Senate. That law gave President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to begin a war in Vietnam that the U.S. would eventually lose.

The cause celebre was an alleged attack by North Vietnamese PT boats against two U.S. Navy destroyers patrolling off the North Vietnamese coast in international waters. Two days before, North Vietnamese PT boats had attacked USS Maddox, causing no damage. Maddox and USS Turner Joy were ordered to return to the patrol area. 

But the second attack, like the discovery of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction four decades later, never took place. 

How the U.S. could make two such grievous miscalculations is less important than preventing similar catastrophic decisions based on faulty or fabricated information. The murder of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran is one such event that could precipitate a disastrous outcome for the wrong reasons.

Who killed the Hamas leader? Israel is the most likely suspect. Israel has undertaken a decapitation strategy to eliminate the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah, killing the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon accused of planning the missile strike that took the lives of 12 Druze children on the Golan Heights.  

But unless Israel was entirely cynical, why eliminate the lead Hamas negotiator if any kind of settlement over hostages and ending the war in Gaza was possible? Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu may have had no intentions of seeking a ceasefire until Hamas was destroyed.

More importantly, if Haniyeh was assassinated by a bomb planted in his apartments, could this have been a Mossad plot? Unless the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Security Forces were incompetent or part of the plot, it seems inconceivable that these apartments were not regularly swept for bugs and bombs.

Who would have had an advanced warning that Haniyeh would stay in this particular flat, and who would have triggered the bomb, since it was not likely preset to explode at a given time?

So far, we have no answers.

The list of possible suspects could include dissidents within the Iranian regime, those wanting to stop the negotiations over Gaza and someone hoping either to provoke escalation against Israel or to isolate Israel further. Tensions between Sunni Hamas and Shia Hezbollah also might have played a role, as neither is a permanent ally.  

In any case, no smoking gun or bomb has directly linked Israel or any other party to the assassination. And the fact that Israel has not taken responsibility does not lead to any particular conclusion.

Yet, Tehran may have little choice other than to retaliate, as Johnson did 60 years ago. Whether such retaliation would have the consequences of the Vietnam War is far from certain. However, a regional war might end in defeat.

There is another reason for worry. Suppose the assassination was made to fabricate allegations against the U.S. as an excuse to threaten or attack U.S. targets in the greater Middle East, forcing the U.S. to retaliate.  

The aim would be to embroil the U.S. in a Middle East conflict that would tax its resources and force profound disruption at home amid a turbulent election. In the event of a USS Cole-type suicide bombing, or something akin to the Beirut barracks bombing of 1983, both presidential candidates could compete to take stronger action.

Donald Trump could have the advantage. Being out of office, he has no responsibility and could be as critical or as outraged as possible at whatever action the current administration takes. Joe Biden is still president and thus the commander-in-chief. Kamala Harris is the nominee. How would decision-making work in this case?

The fear is that any sort of attack against the U.S. in these conditions could easily provoke an overreaction similar to Israel’s response to the heinous and murderous rampage of Oct. 7. In a rush to judgment, would cooler heads prevail to determine first what happened either in the killing of Haniyeh or of an attack made against U.S. targets?

The events of 60 years ago, along with the 2002 authorization to use force in Iraq, should inform our thinking. Ready, fire, aim is not the answer.

Harlan Ullman, PhD is a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council and the prime author of the “shock and awe” military doctrine. His 12th book is “The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD:  How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large.”