The Iranian diaspora has been celebrating and governments around the world have generally not mourned the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in last weekend’s US and Israeli air strikes on Iran.
While there has been much political justification for these attacks from Washington and Jerusalem, neither has sought to legally justify their conduct. No real effort has been made to reference the acknowledged right of self-defence, most likely because the evidence for invoking self-defence did not exist. In other words, there was no prospect of Iran launching an imminent attack.
Inevitably, the legal basis for the original missile attack on Iran will become a minor detail as the conflict develops. Nevertheless, what occurred on February 28 will remain important.
