Iran likely to hit U.S. targets if Israel strikes

WASHINGTON - U.S. officials who have assessed the likely Iranian responses to any attack by Israel on its nuclear program believe Iran would retaliate by launching missiles on Israel and terrorist-style attacks on U.S. civilian and military personnel overseas.

While a missile retaliation against Israel would be virtually certain, according to these assessments, Iran would also be likely to try to calibrate its response against U.S. targets so as not to give the United States a rationale for taking military action that could permanently cripple Tehran's nuclear program.

"The Iranians have been pretty good masters of escalation control," said retired Gen. James Cartwright, who as the top officer at the Strategic Command and as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff participated in war games involving potential adversaries like Iran.

The Iranian targets, Cartwright and other U.S. analysts said, would include petroleum infrastructure in the Persian Gulf and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, where Iran has been accused of shipping explosives to local insurgent forces.

A broad caveat

Both U.S. and Israeli officials who discussed current thinking on the potential ramifications of an Israeli attack believe the last thing Iran would want is a full-scale war on its territory. Their analysis, however, also includes the broad caveat that it is impossible to know the internal thinking of the senior leadership in Tehran and is informed by the awareness that even the most detailed war games cannot predict how nations and their leaders will react in the heat of conflict. Yet such assessments are not just intellectual exercises. Any conclusions on how the Iranians will react to an attack will help determine whether the Israelis launch a strike -- and what the U.S. position will be if they do.

While evidence suggests Iran continues to make progress toward a nuclear weapons program, U.S. intelligence officials believe there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb. But the possibility that Israel will launch a pre-emptive strike has become a focus of U.S. policymakers and is expected to be a primary topic when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with President Obama at the White House on Monday.

But Iran's highly compartmentalized security services, analysts caution, may operate in semi-rogue fashion following goals that seem irrational to planners in Washington. U.S. experts, for example, are still puzzled by a suspected Iranian plot last year to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

"Once military strikes and counterstrikes begin, you are on the tiger's back," said Ray Takeyh, a former Obama administration national security official who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. "And when on the tiger's back, you cannot always pick the place to dismount."

An Israeli formula

If Israel did attack, officials said, Iran would be foolhardy, even suicidal, to invite an overpowering retaliation by directly attacking U.S. military targets -- by, for example, unleashing its missiles at U.S. bases on the territory of Persian Gulf allies.

"The balance the Iranians will try to strike is doing damage that is sufficiently significant but just short of what it would take for America to invade," said Cartwright, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The reference was to three instance in the past two decades when Israel came under attack: the Scud missiles sent by Saddam Hussein into Israel in 1991 during the first Gulf War, the 3,000 rockets fired at Israel by Hezbollah during their 2006 war and the attacks on the Israeli embassy and a Jewish center in Argentina in the early 1990s.

Those attacks each killed between 100 and 200 people, wounded scores more and caused several billion dollars of property damage.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the north had to be evacuated from their homes to bomb shelters or farther south during the 2006 war.

But there is a broad Israeli assessment that Iran's response to an attack would be limited.

"If Iran is struck surgically, it will react -- no doubt," said the former Israeli official, echoing Barak's comments last year. "But that reaction will be calculated and in proportion to its capabilities. Iran will not set the Middle East on fire."

By contrast, administration, military and intelligence officials say Iran would most likely choose anonymous, indirect attacks against nations it views as supporting Israeli policy, in the hope of offering Tehran at least public deniability.

In 2009, the Brookings Institution held a simulation to assess Day Two of an Israeli attack on Iran, casting former government officials, diplomats and regional experts in the roles of U.S., Israeli and Iranian officials. Karim Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, played Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei.