Quote Originally Posted by VanChilds View Post
both at the same time might be tricky but individually the air and sea war would be over inside six months. After that it is just a matter of how much we were willing to sacrifice in regards to a ground fight. But as Kirk said..all bark no bite.
Iran is five times bigger than Iraq geographically with three times as many people. Unlike Iraq where sixteen million Kurds and Shiites were basically on our side against an insurgency derived from five million Iraqi Sunnis, Iran would have an insurgency derived from a population ten times as big, a population still pissed off that we were there a generation ago. In Iraq we fought the insurgency for a while, gave up, put them on the payroll and declared victory. But it took every spare soldier the west could scrape to gether just to hang on there for a few years. We wouldn't get that luxury in Iran. Going in on the ground is not an option unless we had a twenty times bigger army and trillions to fund it, so it's ruled out on both those counts. And what would you get if you did invade? A pissed-off population who'd eventually kick us out then be even more radical than they are now, and zero chance of us gaining anything. We've already got a war like that going on in Afghanistan. All we could do is bomb them and bombing them would 100% guarantee they'd get round to building a nuke, so using the military is pointless.