Iran Has Already Chosen Its Targets for the Next Round

By Avraham Shmulevich

Iran Has Already Chosen Its Targets for the Next RoundISNA

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that American and Israeli commanders have drawn up plans for a short, intense campaign against Iran to follow the Nov. 3 midterm elections. The target list covers nuclear sites, missile, and drone stockpiles and energy infrastructure. No leak is needed to see the preparations. Three carrier groups and thousands of Marines are due in the region by early November. NBC reports that U.S. troops have been quietly pulled from bases in Jordan, Qatar and Kuwait, as they were before the war began in February. On Oct. 19, dozens of Israeli jets flew a possible strike route over Syria and Iraq and turned back near the Iranian border. The same day Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Ovda Air Base.

This is a familiar case of military planning passed off as a decision. The Pentagon has had plans for resuming the war since April. The decision belongs to one man, and his record is well known. By early August, according to an Associated Press count, President Donald Trump had called off scheduled strikes on Iran eight times in five months. The Financial Times reports that earlier this month the Israel Defense Forces were ready for several days of fighting, and Trump blocked the operation until after the vote.

Trump’s October statements contradict each other. On Oct. 8 he wrote that the United States would not attack Iran before the midterms. A week later, he told a rally that he had postponed a strike because of a press leak, mentioned B-2 bombers from Missouri, and said leakers should be shot. A strike that was never planned for the weeks before the election could not have been postponed. Either the Oct. 8 promise was cover, or the leak story was invented to blame reporters. A third reading fits the facts better: leaks have become an instrument of pressure. Days after the call to shoot leakers, The New York Times printed targets and timelines, and the White House said only that it does not comment on plans that may or may not exist. The paper itself writes that American negotiators use the threat of renewed war as leverage in talks on Iran’s nuclear program and control of the Strait of Hormuz.

The price of gasoline sets the date. By August, the national average had climbed from just under $3 a gallon to more than $4. Strikes on Iranian energy would push it higher at the worst possible moment for Republicans. Trump knows this. Refineries are reportedly off the target list, and the military keeps preparing options while he puts off the political decision.
Iran also has a say, and it belongs to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which now runs the country. Since Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day of the war, the Guards have made the strategic decisions, and Mojtaba Khamenei’s title puts a cleric’s face on military rule.

In “The Houthi Paradox,” published here on October 3, I defined targetable value as the portion of an adversary’s indispensable political and military capacity that is concentrated in identifiable, difficult-to-replace physical assets. What matters for coercion is how much indispensable capacity disappears with a destroyed target, whatever the total value destroyed. Iran’s own assets of this kind have been bombed on and off for eight months. Iranian industry is dispersed and partly rebuilt; U.S. intelligence found that drone production resumed during the April ceasefire.
America’s partners within Iran’s reach hold far more targetable value. Iranian drones struck Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura refinery on March 2, three days into the war. Iranian officials and IRGC commanders now name data centers and the undersea internet cables of the Strait of Hormuz as possible targets, and a Tehran analyst quoted by the Times suggests hitting Saudi refineries to drive up energy prices. Tehran understands why Washington spares Iranian refineries and aims at the same weak spot: the price of fuel in the United States.

Iran has already widened the map. With Hormuz closed, the oil that still reaches the market moves through bypass routes, and those routes are now under fire. In March, Iranian drones struck the UAE’s Fujairah oil hub, the outlet of the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline. In June, according to sources cited by Reuters, loading stopped at Oman’s Mina al-Fahal terminal after a drone strike; Oman said operations were normal. In September, drones launched from Iraq shut down Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, which can carry about seven million barrels a day. Trump said Iran was probably responsible.
The weakest point is the Saudi chain that now carries the largest volume around Hormuz: the Abqaiq processing plant, the East-West pipeline, the terminals at Yanbu and, for cargoes bound for Europe, Egypt’s SUMED pipeline, whose flows rose by about 150 percent in the first weeks of the war. A strike on one link can halt the flow along the entire chain. In September 2019, a single attack on Abqaiq briefly knocked out about half of Saudi production. Farther north runs the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which takes Caspian oil to the Mediterranean and carries about a third of Israel’s oil imports. Azerbaijan’s neutrality gives it no cover: in March an Iranian drone hit the airport in Nakhchivan, although President Ilham Aliyev had declared that his country would stay out of the war.

Iran can push up the price of American gasoline from outside its own borders, with a drone on any link of these routes, whatever targets Washington spares inside Iran.

Avraham Shmulevich is an Israeli political analyst and historian specializing in security, political Islam, state capacity, ethnic and national movements, and conflicts involving state and non-state actors. He previously taught Political Islam in the North Caucasus at Ilia State University in Tbilisi. His recent work has appeared in New Eastern Europe and The European.