Invasion of Iraq vs. invasion of Iran. A question or two.

Great Debates
1

First, I didn’t open this for a debate on whether the US should have gone to war with Iraq. Most know my stance anyway, and I know many of yours. What I’m hoping for is a debate on why, assuming any invasion, Iraq was picked instead of Iran.

From what I can see as “selling” points both countries have a US target painted on them. That’s not supposed to sound like a flame statement, but I can’t think of a better way to put it. We’re at war with Iraq now, but it could have just as easily been Iran. It seems to me one or the other was going to get hit after Afghanistan.

So we’re looking at Iran and Iraq. North Korea is too far removed to be an option in this case, and as I’ve WAG’d before, China should be able to handle them.

Iraq = A war GHW Bush built a coalition for to oust Saddam from Kuwait and protect Saudi Arabia. Done deal, but left Saddam in power to thwart UN sanctions for 12 years. Though the US aided Saddam for years as he fought a stalemate war with Iran.

Iran = American-backed Shah of a country that was pro-US overthrown by Theocratic Mullahs. Ayatollah Khomeini (sp?) sent a statement to America by encouraging “students” to overtake the US Embassy and holding hostages for over 400 days. I think they were saying they didn’t agree with us, or something.

So we have the Iraq side of the coin being more recent (plus the little assassination attempt of a former President), but the Iranian side being more direct in targeting US civilians.

Both countries benefitted from US aid at some point. (That’s not to say we own them or they owe us anything. Park that bus at the gate.)

Looking at a map, it seems establishing democracy in Afghanistan and a government sympathetic to the West (and especially America) would be a good foothold.

If the same happens in Iraq (There are plenty of stories of Iraqi’s welcoming liberation from Hussein) there is a geographical “pincers” surrounding Iran. Possibly, or hopefully, this brings reform in Iran. If not, it’s very possible that Iran is next on the Bush list.

So what are your thoughts on Iraq being invaded over Iran? Does my WAG hold water, or is there another strategic goal I’m not seeing? It seems that if we invaded Iran, we’d see very little resistance, other than speeches condemning us (as per The Rules[sup]TM[/sup]) from other Arab nations.

As much as I loath Hussein as a person and what he’s done to a people that were once the shining example of civilization, I can only see one fatal flaw he made concerning his reign.

After losing (yet really winning) a war in 1991, he couldn’t accept keeping power. He hated losing Kuwait and being so thoroughly bitch-slapped by the US that he had to try to kill President Bush. Had he let it go, he’d still be shitting into gold toilets and funding his sick-fuck sons’ endeavors.

GW Bush may have had revenge on his mind, but I don’t have direct contact with him. Maybe he really did trust the intel coming his way. The guy isn’t omnicient, sometimes a leader has to trust his underlings. But that’s another debate.

Anyway, given the rambling OP, would Iran have been a better target given that there would be a war anyway?

I hope that made enough sense :frowning:

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Your post raises a number of questions:

  • which war would ‘sell’ better with the US voters?

  • should the US keep announcing it is ‘at war’ with countries, and invade?

  • why does you say ‘there would be a war anyway’?

We need more information.

What do US voters know about Iran?
How much oil does Iran have?

What would be the US objectives in invading?
Would they bother trying to sell it to other countries?

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-Yup, which war would have gotten more support between the 2 countries?

  • Don’t have to announce any war. I doubt anything would be done without the world knowing.

  • I said that because there is war now. And* assuming* there would be a war anyway…

US voters probably know more about Iraq than Iran because they’re getting the ink lately. Back in 1980 Iran was second only to the USSR in perceived evilness.

No idea how much oil Iran has. But I know where you’re going and it’s bullshit.*

The objectives of the US invading Iran is part of my OP asking for reasons others may see.

*If we were really there for the oil, we’d invade Saudi Arabia. They have much more. Or maybe even Venezuela. They have a few billion barrels themselves.

4

I was pouring scorn on Bush invading partly to get votes. (It’s alarming that you didn’t pick up on that!)

It also worries me that you seem content with the idea the US invades without bothering aobut international law.

What is your method for measuring ‘perceived evilness’? Is it just that a Republican President tells you?

I’m surprised you think that oil is irrelevant.
Of course the US doesn’t need to invade Saudi or Venezuala. These countries sell oil to the US.
You might wonder why the US doesn’t invade Saudi on democratic grounds. Saudi is ruled by a family dictatorship and women in particualar lack rights.
Indeed why doesn’t Bush’s ‘democracy’ campaign include Burma? A democratically elected Government overthrown by a miltary junta? Surely the voice of democratic freedom is calling? (Of course Burma doesn’t have much oil.)

5

Do you actually have any thoughts on the US going to war with Iraq vs Iran, or do you just want to keep this weak pissing match going? Your rabid oil argument is stated. It’s not what I’m looking for. If the Iraq war was about oil (that we were buying from Hussein under the UN…ahem…oil for food program :rolleyes: ) then SA and Venezuela are valid targets as well.

Notice also, I gave the qualifier of ASSUMING we were going to war with any country…

6

Can’t sleep.
Clown will eat me.

Ahem.

To be honest, it’s hard for me to respond as, quite frankly, I’m still in the dark as to the real reason we invaded Iraq. Oh,yes, I’ve heard the three main argruments 1) WMD 2) Links to AQ 3) We’re doing it for the people, the people!

All three have been disproven to a certain extent, although the third still has the last vestiges of tattered creditiblity clinging to it.
So, again, to be honest, I have no idea what the real reason was, although I find it highly disturbing that right after 9/11 the administration was looking for excuses to hit Iraq.

Now, as for reasons why we might’ve chosen Iraq over Iran?
To start with we had Chalabi feeding us phoney intel that may’ve made it seem that invading Iraq would be the easier move.

And yes, oil does play a role. (remember the coup we helped orchestrate in Venezuala? Remember the reason why Bush is so buddy-buddy with Prince Bandar?) But I don’t think it’s the only role. I’d wager that the billions in no-bid contracts awarded to Halliburton also factored into the deal, as did a chance to ‘get the man who tried to kill bush’s daddy!’

Also, it would, IMO, have been an easier ‘sell’ than Iran. We’ve been bombing Iraq off and on (or sending cruise missiles) for quite some time now. We fought a major (kinda) war against them. Out of the two, a Clinton era threat was more relevant than a Carter era threat.

So, yeah, I suppose I end this post as puzzled as when I began. I still don’t buy the official reasons for Iraq, so it’s very hard for me to weigh it again Iran. For all I know Bush chose to invade Iraq becaue of a dream he had.

Hope that made sense…

7

Change will come, but not the way you imply, when a country is threatened by external forces the usual reaction is to dig in the heels and reinforce the current status quo, I don´t know, like the U.S.A. to name one case. :rolleyes:
So the pincers will have the effect of entrenching the current theocracy more.

I, for one, I´m sick of all this faith based realpolitik.

8

Considering the level of brain-dead political support I’ve seen for the war in Iraq, I think Bush could have gotten away with invading ANY Middle Eastern country after 9/11. If he’d been interested in combatting terrorism, the country he SHOULD have invaded is U.S. “ally” Saudi Arabia, where Osama and 19 of the 26 terrorists who were in the planes on 9/11 came from, and where most of the money and political support for Al Qaeda originates.

Of course, this would have inflamed all Muslims to no end, but from what I have seen, this is a fairly easy thing to do – just disagreeing with them seems to suffice – so it’s not really a consideration. I can’t see them hating us any more for Saudi Arabia than they already hate us for Iraq.

So the invasion wasn’t about stopping terror – what, then? Getting rid of inhumane dictatorships? Well, if THAT were the case, wouldn’t it have been a LOT better and MUCH easier to depose Mugabe down in Zimbabwe. The guy stands accused of having tens of thousands of his subject tortured and murdered. He’s so fucking unpopular that should the U.S. invade, the world community would provably respond with nothing more than polite applause, for the most part. And his army is so weak it wouldn’t take much at all to beat them – nothing compared with beating Iraq’s army. Furthermore, we could easily slip a guy into place and leave, just leave someone in who won’t get all mass-murderous.

Not the slightest move toward Mugabe, however, so what is it?

It’s the oil, dummy, the oil!!!

Second largest reserves in the world after the stuff in Saudi Arabia, owned by Bush’s buddies the Sauds. The neocons wanted a base on the ground to hold those oilfield, also within easy striking distance of the Saudi oilfields, should the Saudi regime become unstable, as seems very likely. That’s all it is, or ever was.

9

Oh yeah? Just imagine if you will the unbridled outrage and the unprecedented violence that there would have been had we occupied Mecca.

Are you kidding? Invade Saudi Arabia? You must be out of your mind. That would have made Iraq look like a vacation.

Iraq was done because there was justification (at the time, which turned out to be incorrect), Saddam was already one of our enemies so he was easier to justify, and I think that there was this perception that smacking Iraq around would have resulted in all the fanatics toeing the line out of simple self-interest and self-preservation. Instead we have a mess, and now people know what they can get away with. So we’ve accomplished nothing.

10

Purely as a practical matter, Iran looks as if it’d be a much tougher nut to crack than Iraq. With a population of 69,000,000 we’d likely have three times the number of insurgents to deal with as we do in Iraq. The geography

is also far less favorable to a small, fast, cheap conquest strategy. With Iraq as example of the type of flowers our “liberating” troops would be greeted with, I think we’d be foolish to try Iran with less than a million men on the ground.

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Also, Iraq had a 10-year war with Iran; it took him 10 tears to gain about 10 square miles.

12

duffer:

There are many reasons why Iraq was chosen instead of Iran.
Off the top of my head, they include:
[ul][li]Iran did not have any UNSC resolutions against them whereas Iraq had 17 in which they were, as least technically, in violation.[/li][li]Iran had a much more viable military than Iraq. Iraq had missiles that could barely leave their borders. Iran had missiles that could easily reach American bases in the region thereby adding the element of a much more expanded war.[/li][li]Iran is enormous in comparison to Iraq. The logistics alone make a war much harder to plan and execute.[/li][li]There was even less international support for going to war with Iran. The British, who are in all honesty the only people helping the Americans, swiftly rejected any notions of a war with Iran. This, in addition to Iran being larger, would have put a tremendous burden on American armed forces.[/li][li]Iran was swift to condemn the attacks on 9/11 whereas Saddam replied with a “they got what they had coming to them.” Not a big deal per se, but it made him and Iraq look like they deserved an ass kicking more so than Iran in most Americans’ minds.[/li][li]And last but not least, Iran has an active and advanced nuclear program. It is quite possible that a protracted war could have gotten a lot messier.[/ul][/li]

I’m tempted to use my first ever rolleyes smilie. No, I think they were saying don’t try forcing that murdering tyrant down our throats again like you did in '53.

I disagree. The U.S. is in no position to attack Iran unless they institute a draft and go into much more of a war mode at home (economic and industrial-wise). The current war is unpopular and the notion of a draft seems even less so. So there is no support abroad, no support at home, and no UNSC approval. A war seems unlikely.

No, you’d have Iranians rallying around the current government. Your president called Iran a member of the Axis of Evil and the protests in Iran swelled exponentially. Threaten them with war, and they will do what Americans did when they got attacked on 9/11.
I do not think your WAG holds water. The reason why Iraq was invaded has yet to be revealed, but with the no-fly zones, a battered economy due to sanctions, and the presence of several anti-government militias in Iraq, Iraq was like a wounded animal in comparison to Iran.
capacitor:
Small picking of the nit.
They actually had a lot more than 10 sq miles of territory depending on when in the war you look at it. And it was only 8 years.

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Total tangent, but what’s the acronym WAG mean?

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Not unanimously . . . only 51% of the population of Iran is ethnically Persian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iran The rest are of various nationalities and ethnicities, some of which have a history of aspiring to independence, e.g., the Kurds in the northwest, the Arabs of the southwest, and the Balochis of the east. The Azeris in the north – 24% of the population! – probably feel they have more in common with neighboring Azerbaijan than with Iran. (No cite for that, just a WAG.) A divide-and-rule strategy might be effective, within limits.

15

Wild Ass Guess.

example:
If we had a couple of carrier groups stationed in the Caspian sea, we could quickly seize the coastal plain and occupy Tehran. That would so demoralize the hinterlands that Iran would be ours within 3 months.

16

I disagree. While you are correct that there are some independence movements, none are viable ones. I don’t have a cite handy (will research if you’re interested) but back in 2002 there was a research group meeting where many Iranian groups attended. There were literally two or three very small groups among the Kurds and Azeris that were suggesting breaking away from Iran. The minorities in Iran were never forced from their homes like they were in Iraq or Turkey. The Kurds in Iran do not have the nationalist inspirations that their brethren in Iraq have. Also remember that the Kurds, Azeris, Balouchs, and Iranian Arabs all joined in the war against Iraq.
There is no precedence to indicate that a nationalist movement would rise up and join forces with a foreign army. The closest thing to a militia that the U.S. could hope to count on would be the Mujahedin-eh Khalq (MEK) in Iraq.

17

Wild Assed Guess

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[QUOTE=Nietzsche]

[li]Iran was swift to condemn the attacks on 9/11 whereas Saddam replied with a “they got what they had coming to them.” Not a big deal per se, but it made him and Iraq look like they deserved an ass kicking more so than Iran in most Americans’ minds. [/li][/QUOTE]

I recall things differently. So cite please, being as memory is an imperfect faculty.

Oh c’mon, nobody is that naive.

19

BrainGlutton you have got to get over this persistent belief of yours that modern Iran = nation of the ethnically Persian.

This whole “ethnic Persians make only 51% of the population, therefore the rest can be expected to be disaffected to the point of welcoming invasion” notion is a farce. The Gilaki/Manzandarani, Lur/Bakhtiari ( most of the last four are widely bilingual in the very closely related Farsi ), and most prominently the Azeri turks are intimately tied to Iran by historical and socio-politico-cultural connections. Hell, an Azeri dynasty ruled Iran from 1796-1925 and some of the most powerful families in Pahlavi Iran were Azeri-origined Qajar branches ( for that matter many Iranians are mixed Persian/Turkic ancestry ). The Bakhtiari were one of the dominant players in 19th and early 20th century Iran. Add these populations together and they equal at least 85% of the population that is strongly “Iranian” in national identification. There is no evidence ( that I am aware of ) of strong separatist tendencies among any of the above.

The restive populations, such as they are, are primarily the Kurds, who cannot be given independance without exacerbating the shitstorm in Iraq. The other two possibilities are the Arabs, who despite their predominance in Khuzestan are nonetheless a small group that failed to support Saddam’s invasion, are in majority religiously closely tied to the Iranian clerical establishment and at any rate do not form a discrete geographic block in Iran, and the Baluchi who are far more restive in Pakistan and therefore ( however much you might wish otherwise ) will not be courted by the administration for much the same reasons the Kurds would not. The Baluchi also wouldn’t be much help, as they are remote from virtually all key areas.

  • Tamerlane
20

World reaction
Iran’s Supreme Leader Condemns Attacks On U.S.
Photo gallery of Iranians holding vigils:wink:

Now now.