 Some perspective -- I: The world has not been impoverished by the death of Mahmoud Mabhouh.
Mabhouh was the self-confessed murderer of two Israeli soldiers, Ilan Sa'adon and Avi Sasportas, in two separate kidnap-slayings which he perpetrated with another Hamas terrorist within three months in 1989. He was a founder of Hamas's Izzadin Kassam terror gangs. And since fleeing Gaza to escape the Israeli-imposed consequences of his actions, he had relocated to Damascus to oversee the transfer of Iranian missiles to Hamas for firing across the border at Israeli civilians.
Some perspective -- II: The operation to kill Mabhouh was not botched.
If we are to believe the reports that the Mossad was responsible, this is no recurrence of the 1973 Lillehammer fiasco, when Mossad agents in Norway, assigned to avenge the Black September killings of Israeli Olympians at the Munich Games the previous year, killed an innocent Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, whom they had mistaken for Palestinian terror chief Ali Hassan Salameh.
And again, if we are to believe the reports that the Mossad was responsible, it is no rerun of the 1997 Amman debacle, when Mossad agents, seeking to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, were apprehended after pouring toxins into Mashaal's ear, and the fallout from a failed Israeli hit conducted in broad daylight on the streets of the Jordanian capital threatened to scupper the three-year-old peace treaty. Political relations between Israel and Jordan were already strained, and it was the quiet security partnership that had formed the bedrock of bilateral cooperation. When the Mashaal mess destabilized that partnership, there was no warm political relationship to soften the blow, and ties were only salvaged when Israel supplied the antidote to save Mashaal's life and released Hamas's bloodthirsty founding ideologue Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in order to secure the return of its captured agents.
In Dubai last month, Mabhouh was killed -- and killed in such a way that it was not immediately obvious his had been an unnatural demise.
His assassins, furthermore, safely made their escape, dispersing to a variety of distant destinations.
Some perspective - III: It is a reflection of how amateurish aspects of the Dubai hit now appear that some "experts" are theorizing that it could not possibly have been a Mossad operation. In these analyses, Israel's famed intelligence service, for all its occasional screw-ups, simply would not have green-lighted a mission that would have compromised a dozen or more key operatives -- their smiling features on their false passports immortalized in every global intelligence database, and caught on closed-circuit camera after camera meandering along hotel corridors and slipping in and out of disguises en route to Room 320 at the Al-Bustana Rotan.
Such dubious analyses, however, are being promulgated with hindsight -- now that the Dubai authorities have proved themselves to be some distance from the ostensibly bumbling incompetents who, until the last few days, might have been relied upon in some quarters to fail to pick up the trail of the assassins.
Until recently, for more than three weeks after the Mabhouh strike, leading Israeli politicians were winking and smiling as apparently unconfirmable accusations of Mossad involvement swirled around the region. Cats who had swallowed the cream, they gave the smug collective impression of having so much that they wanted to tell us, if only they could. This mood of self-satisfaction permeated parts of the Hebrew media, where Mossad head Meir Dagan was hailed as an intelligence chief par excellence, who had revived the service and taken bold action where predecessors had been unwarrantedly cautious -- a man who had dared and won.
Now, though, we have lurched from self-congratulation to castigation. Even as official Israel, true to the traditional policies of ambiguity, chooses neither to confirm nor deny responsibility for the assassination, the suddenly roused critics are asking bitterly whether, 13 years later, the same prime minister under whom the Mashaal affair had played out, again failed to ask the necessary questions, impose the necessary amendments, take the necessary precautions. 
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