The Straight Dope on the War Situation

I don't know a whole lot about Iran, although I probably know more than 99% of Americans. I wrote the Today in Iraq blog for many years, and later started to cover Afghanistan as well. Both countries border Iran, and Iran was a very important factor in the U.S. occupation of Iraq. 

 

George Bush II is not a very bright guy, but the people around him -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the gang -- weren't quite as stupid and incompetent as the people around Cheeto Benito. They knew they couldn't dislodge the Baathist regime and get something more to their liking just by bombing the country, so they decided to finish what George Bush I started by invading the country and ruling it by force. As you may recall, unless you're too young,  

 

 As you know, in order to remove the Baathist regime and try to install a new one, the U.S. occupied Iraq for 8 years, at the cost of more than 4,000 U.S. troops' lives and something like 250,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians. During much of that time Iraq was convulsed by a horrific civil war, out of which the Islamic State emerged which took over a good chunk of Syria as well as Mosul and the Yazidi region of Iraq, requiring a secondary war in which the U.S. was deeply embroiled. (I'll get to a bit more about that anon.) When the U.S. finally cut out in 2011 it left behind a regime which is not as oppressive as the Saddam Hussein regime, but is corrupt, inept, and not particularly friendly to the U.S. It's complicated, but Iran wields substantial influence with the Iraq federal government, the opposite of the situation under Saddam, who as you also may recall tried to conquer Iran in 1980, leading to an 8 year war in which about 500,00 people died. 

 

The reason Iran is influential in Iraq today is that the majority of the Iraqi population is Shiite, and therefore feels some affinity with Iran. In fact the Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr spent many years in the Iranian city of Qom studying theology.  Several Iranian-backed militias operate in Iraq, and during the occupation some of them spent more energy attacking U.S. troops than they did participating in the sectarian civil war. Some Iraq Shiites are nationalists who resent Iranian influence, and obviously the Sunni Arab and Kurdish populations of Iraq are hostile to Iraq, but Iran has enough influence that Iraq will at least stay on the sidelines in the present conflict, while Iran's proxy militias may well get involved. 

 

That they have not evidently gotten involved so far is probably largely for pragmatic reasons. U.S. troops in Iraq are based in Kurdistan and the Sunni Arab Anbar province, which means the Iranian backed militias don't have access to them. Iraqi Kurdistan is a semi-autonomous state, which participates in the Iraqi federal parliament but is also self-governing. Kind of like Scotland, except that Kurdistan has its own army, the peshmerga. The Iraqi Kurds would like to support the Iranian Kurds who also want their own state, but as part of federated Iraq they can't set their own foreign policy. While they briefly had dreams of independence, they realized that they're landlocked and basically have no choice but to be part of Iraq if they want to export their oil and otherwise trade with the world. They might allow an Iranian Kurdish insurgency to be launched from their territory but all that's going to accomplish is a Kurdish quasi-state in northern Iran, it won't affect the rest of the country. The Kurds certainly aren't going to march on Tehran.

So, what would it take to dislodge the Iranian regime and try to set up a puppet government? (A plan which failed in Iraq.) Bombing from the air can destroy most of Iran's potential offensive weaponry, but it can't kill a million troops equipped with small arms -- the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, regular army, and police. The Iranian regime and its affiliated militias in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere are motivated by profound religious beliefs. They aren't going away. The population of Iraq is a little more than half the population of Iran. A ground invasion of Iran to install a regime of Dump's choosing would require twice the force that invaded Iraq, which BTW was launched through Kuwait. There is no country bordering Iran that would conceivably allow a U.S. invasion from its territory, so it would have to be an amphibious assault, presumably from the Gulf of Oman which is 1,000 miles from Tehran.

 

It's no surprise that the Administration has started talking about a military draft because that's what it would take. Obviously it would be a long time before the U.S. could assemble an invasion force and hit the beaches with the 500,000 or so troops it would require. As a practical matter, I would say it's impossible. So I wouldn't lose any sleep over that. But what I might lose sleep over is that there is no evident end to this in sight, until the U.S. runs out of bombs and missiles. Meanwhile, you can look forward to gasoline rationing.