When you hear people beating the Iran war drum, please remind them of these facts.

Xithras

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Oct-12-11 02:23 PM
Original message

When you hear people beating the Iran war drum, please remind them of these facts.

Once again, people are beating the drum to go to war with Iran. I'm not going to get into discussing whether or not that beating is justified, but people need to remember a few things. Iran isn't Libya. It's not Iraq, and it's not Afghanistan. I've seen numerous discussions about Iran's "act of war" on the web today, and have been horrified to see multiple comments by people who think that we should just invade and be done with them "once and for all." People are incorrectly assuming that war with Iran will be a cakewalk, looking something like our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (which, 10 years later, are still clusterf***s that are killing people daily).

Here are a few facts for the hawks:

1) Physically, Iran covers about 640,000 square miles of land. That is 30% larger than Iraq and Afghanistan COMBINED. It's four times the size of the Germany we went to war with in WW2. In fact, it's the size of modern Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal combined, and would easily be the largest nation we've made war with in 150 years.

2) With over 75 million people, the population of Iran is larger than that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It's also larger than the combined population of Germany and Japan in WW2.

3) Unlike Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan, Iran has a domestic defense industry and is a net exporter of weapons, supplying arms to over 50 countries. While they may be considerably behind us in aerospace, their conventional ground forces are well armed and are capable of resupplying themselves domestically. They supply their own oil, iron, and other raw materials needed to keep their military operational. They also possess cruise missiles capable of hitting precise targets at a distance, and anti-aircraft missiles capable of downing modern fighters. Unlike many of the resource limited nations we've been fighting recently, Iran's military isn't entirely comprised of Russian hand-me-downs.

4) Unlike Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, the Iranian government still enjoys broad support of a substantial portion of its population across the country, and especially in more rural areas. Recent protests demonstrate that the support isn't universal, and there is a fairly large movement to democratize the country, but support for an actual overthrow is still fairly small and there is NO organized armed resistance in the country.

5) Unlike Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, Iran is a fairly modern country technologically, with cell-phones, cameras, and Internet access available to most of the population. War against that country would result in a constant barrage of videos showing the daily suffering and "collateral damage" suffered by average Iranians, and could be a PR nightmare for the United States.

Please don't let our past few relatively bloodless wars fool you. An open war with Iran would require a military mobilization on a scale unseen in this country in many decades, and could easily result in an American death toll unseen in generations.

I don't support the Iranian government and would like to see the people of Iran rise up and replace it with something more free and open, but this idea that we can "easily" invade them and "impose freedom" isn't simply delusional, but could lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers. I have no doubt that we would EVENTUALLY win, but how many thousands of American soldiers are we willing to bury in order to achieve that victory?