Iran: The Day After

Iran: The Day After is a very sobering look at the possibilities.

If the U.S. attacks Iran - with nuclear or "conventional" bombs - it is virtually certain that Iranian retaliation will be swift and lethal. Iran's surrounding neighborhood is, as the military jargon puts it, "target-rich." Iran's military strategists will have a wide choice.
A direct attack on U.S. troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region (Oman and Qatar are both possibilities) is only the first option. Iran's military is certainly no match for the Pentagon, but serious retaliation doesn't require that; Tehran has plenty of conventional capacity to target those troop concentrations.
How about Israel? Tel Aviv has been making bellicose threats towards Iran even before the Bush administration took up the crusade, and Israel's 1981 destruction of Iraq's French-built nuclear power plant at Osirak still looms large in Middle Eastern memories. Iran's missiles can certainly reach Israeli cities. And given President Bush's statements that Iran represents a threat to Israel, and that the U.S. will do whatever is needed to "protect our ally," it is certainly possible that Iran's retaliation will target Israel, regardless of whether it is ultimately U.S. or Israeli bombers that drop their lethal payload.
Another possibility would be an attack through proxies, particularly in Iraq. Iraqi Shi'a and others, outraged by the expansion of Washington's war to Iran, could well push already unstable parts of the country over the edge. Southern Iraq could collapse into chaos and violence. (Conversely, the widely-discussed claim that Iran might retaliate against the U.S. by "turning loose" Hezbollah to commit rampant terror attacks around the world appears to be grounded less in facts than in febrile Washington imaginations. Such a scenario assumes that Hezbollah, a decades-old anti-occupation movement in Lebanon created to resist Israel's 1982 invasion, is nothing more than a cat's-paw of the Iranian regime that Tehran can deploy at will. It denies the reality of Hezbollah's independent, popular legitimacy, including its powerful representation in the Lebanese parliament, and the fact that despite long-standing Iranian support, Hezbollah's strategic imperatives are driven by Lebanese, not Iranian, realities.)
And what about the oil weapon? Iran certainly has the capacity to shut the strategic, but potentially vulnerable, Strait of Hormuz, through which a huge proportion of Middle Eastern oil flows to the rest of the world. What if the Iranian navy scuttled an oil tanker in the Strait, blocking oil traffic? What if it was a U.S. tanker?

Let's hope we don't see this "day after." No pre-emptive or preventive wars!