How Will Iran Respond? – Michael Rubin

The bombast was expected, but will the Islamic Republic make good on its threats?

Those who have met Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei say he’d rather become a martyr than acquiesce to the unconditional surrender of a program—hopelessly intertwined with his legacy—that he revived and supported for more than 35 years. Perhaps he is serious, but the idea that a supreme leader’s repeated declarations rule out reversal is contradicted by precedent. After all, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 Islamic Revolution, repeatedly said he would not release U.S. hostages absent the extradition of the shah to Iran and an apology from the United States. Jimmy Carter refused most of Khomeini’s demands, and once Ronald Reagan was elected, Khomeini reconsidered the wisdom of holding Americans hostage, fearing a more meaningful response than Carter would consider.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran on September 22, 1980, with the aim of seizing Iran’s oil-producing region and ending Khomeini’s Islamic Republic. Iran’s military was reeling from Khomeini’s purges of those loyal to the shah at the time, but within about two years, Iranian forces had rallied and largely driven the Iraqi army and its elite Republican Guard outside Iranian territory. Khomeini and his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sought to not only end Saddam’s rule, but also “liberate” Jerusalem from Jewish control—a foundational goal of the Islamic Republic. Khomeini voiced these calls repeatedly—up until the day he concluded that continuing the war effort would put his entire Islamic Republic at risk. “It’s like drinking from a chalice of poison,” he said on July 20, 1988, as he accepted a ceasefire agreement. But if his regime was to survive, he had no other choice.

Khamenei likely fears he could not survive a similar compromise, as his foreign adventurism and decision to divert billions of dollars to Iran’s covert and illegal nuclear program meant significant deprivations for the Iranian people. With this weekend’s bombing of Fordow in particular, those decades of investment could very well have gone up in smoke. At best, Khamenei may be left with a stockpile of nuclear material, but no facility in which to work it; at worst, his entire weapons program is sealed under a collapsed mountain. Either way, even his own core supporters could turn on him if they conclude he is weak. After all, as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden once quipped, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”

It is for this reason that some Iranian response to this weekend’s strikes is inevitable. When Trump ordered a drone strike on Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, during his first term, Khamenei similarly swore revenge. It came within days in the form of drone and missile strikes on two Iraqi bases—Erbil and Al Asad—where American service members were present. Some Americans were injured, but there were no fatalities. Khamenei had his performative response that he could point to—and exaggerate—domestically, but he knew better than to test the United States further.

While Khamenei could target American facilities in the Arab Gulf states this time around, such strikes would be unlikely to inflict much damage. After all, U.S. forces have apparently already evacuated Qatar, as Qatari authorities forbade them from using the Al-Udeid Air Base to support operations against the Islamic Republic. The Pentagon has service members in the United Arab Emirates, but any attack there would risk Abu Dhabi retaliating by seizing hundreds of billions of dollars of Iranian investments within their territory. Bahrain, where the U.S. Navy headquarters its Fifth Fleet, could be vulnerable to retaliation, but the Navy has already dispatched most of its ships to sea, out of range of Iranian drones, cruise missiles, and mines. 

More likely, Iran will retaliate for Saturday’s strikes by proxy—and in ways U.S. planners cannot foresee. In other words, the U.S. embassies in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, and Beirut, for example, are far less likely to be targets of Iranian-sponsored terrorism than the U.S. embassies in, say, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, and Bishkek, to name three capitals where security might be more relaxed if host governments believe themselves to be out of harm’s way.

Indeed, the Islamic Republic’s response will likely be shaped by ideological considerations as much as military ones. Khamenei’s antisemitism is deeply ingrained; ideologically, he does not differentiate in any meaningful way between Israelis and Jews. As the late Hassan Nasrallah, secretary-general of Hezbollah, allegedly quipped to Lebanon’s Daily Star on October 22, 2002, “If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” But given the events of the past week, Khamenei may decide that “the trouble” is worth it, declaring open season on Jews around the globe. He’s done so before, ordering Iranian and Hezbollah operatives to target a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, and such attacks may soon become a regular occurrence. Expect the Iranian regime to go after synagogues in North America and Europe, as well as Chabad outposts in Africa and Asia.

The execution of such attacks could come from unexpected places. In 2006, for example, an Iranian immigrant who served in the Arkansas National Guard was arrested after an astute bartender alerted the FBI about suspicious questions he was asking regarding logistics and movement. I became aware of the incident when asked to help provide an expert witness who could testify about certain Iranian documents on the case, and a subsequent investigation found that he had lied on his immigration papers and had served previously in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In 1980, the Iranian regime recruited Dawud Salahuddin—born David Theodore Belfield in North Carolina—to kill Ali Akbar Tabatabaei, an Iranian dissident and Khomeini critic, in Bethesda, Maryland. And in 2011, the Quds Force attempted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States in the heart of Washington, D.C., working with Mexican drug cartels to place a car bomb outside a popular Georgetown restaurant.

Israelis have grown accustomed to airport-style security checkpoints in just about all public spaces—bus and train stations, shopping malls, universities—and Iranian agents or lone wolves inspired by them may soon make such measures necessary in the United States as well. An attack on an Ivy League university or a busy train station—or one targeting children of the political and business elite—would amplify Iran’s goals. U.S. national security officials need to start assessing these soft targets and terrorists’ ability to strike them, no matter how remote the possibility of an attack seems. After all, Iranian agents will likely direct their retaliation against the easiest targets.

The worst-case scenario, of course, would be an Iranian dirty bomb targeting the ports and financial centers that drive the American economy. While Trump expressed hope Saturday evening that the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities would be a one-off event, such triumphalism is premature absent the removal of all Iranian nuclear material, including the regime’s large stockpiles of enriched uranium, outside of the country. Here, planning appears murky if it has occurred at all, as the International Atomic Energy Agency may not have the desire—or be trusted enough by Israel and the United States—to do the job. The Islamic Republic cannot yet explode a fissile nuclear warhead, but it may still be able to scatter radiation via its current warheads and suitcase bombs.

Such threats would become even more dire should the Iranian regime collapse without a clear chain of custody for its remaining nuclear material, especially if Iranian claims of removing enriched uranium from the targeted sites prior to their bombardment are accurate. The Pentagon has plans in place to secure Pakistan’s nuclear missiles should the Pakistani state collapse; the Trump administration might need to craft similar plans to prevent Iran’s ample nuclear supply from being diverted into even more dangerous hands.

In the wake of such a high-profile and devastating attack on Iranian nuclear sites, the odds of Tehran exacting revenge of some sort are high. In an ideal world, Trump’s warnings against attacking Americans would be heeded. But even if they aren’t, such attacks wouldn’t retroactively render the administration’s decision to take out Iran’s nuclear program a mistake.