What would Tehran’s retaliation look like should the United States join Israel’s war on Iran?

Well, America’s experience in January 2020 provided a small hint. As you may recall, on January 3^rd, President Trump’s orders U.S. forces assassinated General Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Following the drone strike which killed Soleimani at the Baghdad airport, Iran rained 11 ballistic missiles on the American Al Asad air base in Iraq. The base was devastated. As CBS 60 Minutes documented in August 2021, without either sufficient anti-missile systems or bunkers for the 2,000 Americans to seek cover, over 100 of our airmen suffered traumatic brain injuries. Miraculously, no Americans were killed. The Iranians signaled their January 7, 2020 counter-strike represented the end of their response.

For his part, Commander-in-Chief Trump brushed off the extensive damage and severe injuries at the U.S. base as the equivalent of an ill-timed fart. As the AP reported on January 8, 2020:

“I heard they had headaches and a couple of other things ... and I can report it is not very serious,” Trump said at a press conference in Davos, Switzerland. He said that potential traumatic brain injuries are less severe than, say, missing limbs.

“No, I don’t consider them very serious injuries relative to other injuries that I’ve seen,” the president said, and described meeting previously with U.S. troops wounded by roadside bombs. “I’ve seen people with no legs and with no arms. I’ve seen people that were horribly, horribly injured in that area, that war.”

“No, I do not consider that to be bad injuries, no,” he added.

Had even one American service man or woman died there, Trump—and the American people—likely would have demanded revenge. But Trump and the United States got lucky five years ago.

As the New York Times is reporting tonight, we likely won’t be so fortunate this time. If President Trump commits U.S. forces to Israel’s preventive war against the Iranian nuclear infrastructure he was negotiating just days ago to contain, Tehran will have no shortage of retaliatory options against American targets in the region, including the 40,000 U.S. troops stationed there:

“Iran has prepared missiles and other military equipment for strikes on U.S. bases in the Middle East should the United States join Israel’s war against the country, according to American officials who have reviewed intelligence reports…

Fears of a wider war are growing among American officials as Israel presses the White House to intervene in its conflict with Iran. If the United States joins the Israeli campaign and strikes Fordo, a key Iranian nuclear facility, the Iranian-backed Houthi militia will almost certainly resume striking ships in the Red Sea, the officials said. They added that pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria would probably try to attack U.S. bases there.

Other officials said that in the event of an attack, Iran could begin to mine the Strait of Hormuz, a tactic meant to pin American warships in the Persian Gulf.”

The scenarios are potentially even more dire than that. For years, American national security planners have war-gamed a conflict with Iran. The results, as I documented 10 years ago in “This Is What War with Iran Would Look Like,” would not be pretty.

No doubt, the combination of American technical advances and the blows Israel has already delivered to Iran and its Hezbollah proxies make the worst-case outcomes less likely. But at a time when the top national security priorities of the United States are to out-compete China and contain Russian expansionism, a costly conflict with Tehran is one America simply cannot afford. As we learned in Iraq, the opportunity cost of wars of choice is very high.

In March 2012, President Obama pushed back hard on the Republicans who criticized his approach to the Iranian nuclear program. “If some of these folks think that it's time to launch a war, they should say so,” Obama warned, “And they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be.”

That’s exactly what Donald Trump must do now. After all, by unilaterally withdrawing the United States in 2018 from the successful deal Obama secured, Trump is responsible for triggering Iran’s accelerated enrichment program. As for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he and his countrymen must confront Colin Powell’s infamous “Pottery Barn Rule”: they broke it, they own it.