With the election looming in November, Michael DiMino, a former CIA analyst now serving as a fellow and public policy manager at Defense Priorities, said Israel was “pushing to change the facts on the ground as much as they can” during a virtual discussion hosted by his think tank.
“And I think similarly, the Iranians are going to try to hold back,” he added, “maybe in the hopes that the Harris administration is more willing to back to something that looks like the JCPOA or something similar.”
DiMino served as a watch officer at the CIA operations center the morning that Iran shot down a U.S. drone during a previous period of heightened tensions that nearly led to direct U.S. strikes on Iran in 2019. Today, he described Iran’s missile strike against Israel as “fairly moderate” given the string of Israeli operations for which it was intended to serve as retaliation.
Responding to Newsweek’s question regarding the limits of what Iranian officials describe as their “restraint,” DiMino said, “Everybody’s got a line,” and that line “could be a serious attack on their nuclear infrastructure.
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