Iran Options For Retaliation: Hezbollah

The players: Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which includes Quds Force and Special Unit of Martyr Seekers; Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS); Hezbollah.

During this critical time of talk about a potential military attack against Iran by the U.S. it still remains unclear just how intent the U.S. is on commencing an a strike. But there is much for the U.S. to consider in such an attack given that Iran is not a defenseless nation, as has been all the other nations that the U.S. has launched an attack against in the past 30 years (and there have been many).
Nonetheless, the U.S. military planners are reportedly busy gathering up intelligence, identifying Iranian military and infrastructure targets.

According to a Stratfor report, sources have it that Iran has a retaliation strategy in place that would include delivering attacks against troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as against other U.S. interests (which largely refers to U.S. corporate interests, not so much the people of the U.S.) in the region and globally.
Such attacks could be carried out by Hezbollah under the guidance of Imad Fayez Mugniyah, who according to Stratfor's citing of reports "has been training Shite militants from Arab Persian Gulf states in Lebanon's Bekka Valley for retaliatory attacks.

Now, Hezbollah we should note makes al Qaeda look like a Johnny-come-lately. Hezbollah has serious military might and has ties with the Iranian IRGC and MOIS from which it has received advanced military and intelligence training. There is a likely strong allegiance to Iran for this support, and it makes it doubtful that Hezbollah, despite seeing the fate of al Qaeda, which has been seriously broken by U.S. counterinsurgency operations, would refuse to aid Iran.
Stratfor notes, "The Hezbollah cadre also is experienced in skulduggery, having conducted scores of transnational terrorist operations before al Qaeda was even formed. In fact, al Qaeda has borrowed many pages from the Hezbollah operational playbook..."

This is a far more formidable force to deal with than al Qaeda. Certainly the military imbalance between the U.S. and Iran is profound, with the U.S. having capabilities of bombing Iran off the map. However, the costs could be so extreme in terms of the fatalities Iran is capable of producing through endless comparatively small terrorist operations, as compared to the massive terrorist operations such as we have seen perpetrated by the U.S. against Iraq and other weaker countries.

Now this is a tremendous moral consideration as well as strategic, though often the emphasis of such reporting is on the latter. The two tier moral considerations as I see it involve 1) looking at the motivations behind an action, such as in this case, the U.S. intent to prevent Iran from shifting petro-currency transactions to the Euro, and 2) the consequences of an action regardless of the justification for carrying it out.

In other words, we have first and foremost a responsibility to examine the "official story" being fed to us which aims to influence us, the people, to support more military action, and more massive destruction, and more untold deaths of civilians. To see the untold story is paramount, and then judge the legitimacy of wagging further war.

www.stratfor.com.