If it is verified that Iran has a nuclear weapons development program should we resort to airstrikes despite the consequences? Are we prepared for the price of oil to duble or triple as part of the consequences of airstrikes? If airstrikes are not your option of choice, what direction would you take with Iran? M

How Iran would retaliate if it comes to war
By Scott Peterson
Fri Jun 20, 4:00 AM ET

Go to this link to read the full article:
How Iran would retaliate if it comes to war - Yahoo! News

Pressure is building on Iran. This week Europe agreed to new sanctions and President Bush again suggested something more serious – possible military strikes – if the Islamic Republic doesn't bend to the will of the international community on its nuclear program.

But increasingly military analysts are warning of severe consequences if the US begins a shooting war with Iran. While Iranian forces are no match for American technology on a conventional battlefield, Iran has shown that it can bite back in unconventional ways.

Iranian networks in Iraq and Afghanistan could imperil US interests there; American forces throughout the Gulf region could be targeted by asymmetric methods and lethal rocket barrages; and Iranian partners across the region – such as Hezbollah in Lebanon – could be mobilized to engage in an anti-US fight.

Iran's response could also be global, analysts say, but the scale would depend on the scale of the US attack. "One very important issue from a US intelligence perspective, [the Iranian reaction] is probably more unpredictable than the Al Qaeda threat," says Magnus Ranstorp at the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm.

"I doubt very much our ability to manage some of the consequences," says Mr. Ranstorp, noting that Iranian revenge attacks in the past have been marked by "plausible deniability" and have had global reach.

"If you attack Iran you are unleashing a firestorm of reaction internally that will only strengthen revolutionary forces, and externally in the region," says Ranstorp. "It's a nightmare scenario for any contingency planner, and I think you really enter the twilight zone if you strike Iran."

Though the US military has since early 2007 accused Iran's Qods Force – an elite element of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – of providing anti-US militias in Iraq with lethal roadside bombs, and of training and backing "special groups" in actions that the US government alleges have cost "thousands" of lives, US commanders have played down Iran's military capabilities.

Even Admiral William Fallon, who publicly opposed a US strike on Iran before he resigned in April, dismissed Iran as a military threat. "Get serious," Adm. Fallon told Esquire in March. "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them."

But that has not kept Iran from rhetorical chest-beating, with an active military manpower of 540,000 – the largest in the Middle East – dependent on some of the lowest per capita defense spending in the region. Iran "can deal fatal blows to aggressor America by unpredictable and creative tactical moves," the senior commander Brig. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid said in late May. "It is meaningless to back down before an enemy who has targeted the roots of our existence."

Iran's supreme religious leader Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei also warned of far-reaching revenge in 2006. "The Americans should know that if they assault Iran, their interests will be harmed anywhere in the world that is possible," he said. "The Iranian nation will respond to any blow with double the intensity."

Analysts say Iran has a number of tools to make good on those threats and take pride in taking on a more powerful enemy. "This is not something they are shying away from," says Alex Vatanka, a Middle East security analyst at Jane's Information Group in Washington.

"They say: 'Conventional warfare is not something we can win against the US, but we have other assets in the toolbox,' " says Mr. Vatanka, noting that the IRGC commander appointed last fall has been "marketed as this genius behind asymmetric warfare doctrine."

"What they are really worried about is the idea of massive aerial attacks on literally thousands of targets inside Iran," says Vatanka, also an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute. "Their reading of America's intentions in that scenario would be twofold: One is to obviously dismantle as much as possible the nuclear program; and [the other], indirectly try to weaken the [Islamic] regime."

Any US-Iran conflict would push up oil prices, and though Iran could disrupt shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf, its weak economy depends on oil revenues.

But nearby US forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Gulf provide a host of targets. Iran claimed last October that it could rain down 11,000 rockets upon "the enemy" within one minute of an attack and that rate "would continue."

Further afield, Israel is within range of Iran's Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, and Hezbollah claims its rockets – enhanced and resupplied by Iran since the 2006 war to an estimated 30,000 – can now hit anywhere in the Jewish state, including its nuclear plant at Dimona.

Closer to home, Iran has honed a swarming tactic, in which small and lightly armed speedboats come at far larger warships from different directions. A classified Pentagon war game in 2002 simulated just such an attack and in it the Navy lost 16 major warships, according to a report in The New York Times last January.

"The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack," Lt. Gen. K. Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who commanded the swarming force, told the Times. "The whole thing was over in five, maybe 10 minutes."

During the 1990s, Iranian agents were believed to be behind the assassinations of scores of regime opponents in Europe, and German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Iran's intelligence minister.

Iran and Hezbollah are alleged to have collaborated in the May 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in revenge for Israel's killing of a Hezbollah leader months before. Argentine prosecutors charge that they jointly struck again in 1994, bombing a Jewish community center in the Argentine capital that killed 85, one month after Israel attacked a Hezbollah base in Lebanon.

With some 30,000 on the payroll by one count, Iranian intelligence "is a superpower in intelligence terms in the region; they have global reach because of their reconnaissance ability and quite sophisticated ways of inflicting pain," says Ranstorp. "They have been expanding their influence.… Who would have predicted that Argentina would be the area that Hezbollah and the Iranians collectively would respond?"

Past examples show that "Tehran recognizes that at times its interest are best served by restraint," says a report on consequences of a strike on Iran published this week by Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

But Iran could target the US, too, depending on the magnitude of any US strike. "Iran's capacity for terror and subversion remains one of its most potent levers in the event of a confrontation with the United States," says the report, adding that "success" in delaying Iran's nuclear programs could backfire.

If "US and world opinion were so angered by the strikes that they refused to support further pressure against Iran's nuclear ambitions, then prevention could paradoxically [eventually ensure] Iran's open pursuit of nuclear weapons," concludes the report.

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The question of an Iranian Nuclear Weapons program is a big hypothetical while they continue to uphold the NPT and there is a complete lack of evidence they are working to produce a bomb.

However, their reaction to an attack would be quite devastating on the US as they have a very strong armed forces. Not to mention a phalanx of missiles aimed at the US navy in the gulf against which the US navy has no known defense (the sunburn missile).
They won't be a pushover like Iraq. I doubt Israel would let the US wait 10 years for sanctions to soften them up and kill babies first either.

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"Well done Dubya. You freakin' imbecile." - ViolaLee

Your article fails to mention what the effects of a massive pre-emptive strike would be against Iranian military targets. We would effectively devestate Iran.

Wouldn't that be wonderful?!

I agree with Jafar completely, I know little of military strategy and such but the issue is moot anyway and I do know that American soldiers and their British counterparts are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan getting killed by people armed with AKs and primitive rockets, so who knows what a modern army, well organsied, could do.

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No, it wouldn't be wonderful. Fortunately, it's unlikely to happen.

You admit that you don't understand military capabilities yet you assume Iran has superior abilities. That is a foolish assumption. We could level Iran in days without putting one boot on the ground.

That's the difference between a war and an occupation, remember Iraq had an organized military, with troops, armoured vehicals, and tanks, and look what we did to that. A war with Iran would go very well for the US (militarily speaking), an occupation on the other hand, would be disasterous. If we are going to strike first, we are going to go all out, take out as many military structures as possible, and although much of our infantry is in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force and Navy is much more free to carry out tactical strikes.

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It really concerns me to hear this sort of rhetoric from an Admiral, or anybody in positions of power. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, this is not respectful or honorable language. America should be above this schoolyard-style taunting.

This government has absolutely no concept of propriety or class.

(Their response to me would be "So?")

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An employee gets trampled to death by a frenzied, greedy mob at a Walmart sale, and customers actually complained when the store closed. Yet, I'm the bad guy for suggesting policies that assume people act like retarded herd animals that need government nannying and control....

And their in lies your problems. With that arrogant superior attitude that you are the best and your enemy doesnt stand a chance leaves you blind to their strenght and the commintment of their resistance.

But on side note what would leveling Iraq in days achieve? Apart from the deaths of thousands maybe millions of civilians initially, then of course the occupation thousands more and then the aftermath and the rebuilding which will affect the population far into the future. And what will it all be for, to demonstrate that no one ma dare stand up to Americas might, and so that the middle class of the Western Hemisphere can fill up the petrol tank of their SUVs at a relatively low price.

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"We will disobey your laws as long as they are unjust and they make a world shaped only for your profit"-G8 protestor Genoa 2001





NO PASERÁN!!

"We learned a long time ago that we should never subject ourselves to the schedules of the powerful. We had to follow our own calendar and impose it on those above.” - Subcommandante Marcos

Since when is the truth a display of arrogance? I'm merely pointing out that if the US chose a coordinated pre-emptive strike we would absolutely devestate Iran.

No need for an occupation. We wipe out the bulk of their military, their nuclear facilities and leave Iran without an offensive military capability.

Even if we devastated Iran with an airstrike, it would be very likely given their fundamentalist extremism that they could start an Al Qaeda like Shia organization that would have targets in America. Then there are our troops in Iraq that would be a readily accessible target.

I just read an article claiming the Israelies just put their military through a rehearsal of bombing Iran. With that scenario, it would be expected that Iran would join Hezbollah and other Shia militia groups against Israel. Syria is a Shia nation and might join.

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