The Iranian targets, General Cartwright and other American analysts believe, would include petroleum infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, and American troops in Afghanistan, where Iran has been accused of shipping explosives to local insurgent forces…
In November, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said any Iranian retaliation for an Israeli attack would be “bearable,” and his government’s estimate that Iran is engaging in a bluff has been a key element in the heightened expectations that Israel is considering a strike. But Iran’s highly compartmentalized security services, analysts caution, may operate in semi-rogue fashion, following goals that seem irrational to planners in Washington. American experts, for example, are still puzzled by a suspected Iranian plot last year to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington…
A former Israeli official said the best way to think about retaliation against Israel was through a formula he called “1991 plus 2006 plus Buenos Aires times 3 or 5.” The reference was to three instances in the last 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 100 to 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 further south during the 2006 war…
A former Israeli official said the best way to think about retaliation against Israel was through a formula he called “1991 plus 2006 plus Buenos Aires times 3 or 5.” The reference was to three instances in the last 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 100 to 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 further south during the 2006 war.
But there is a broad Israeli assessment that Iran’s response to an attack would be limited.
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