"You said: Obviously the US military would roll over Iraq, and it's just as obvious it would roll over Iran, though it would be a bit harder..."

"This is an understatement. Iran's population is almost three times that of iraq. The Iranian army has a small air force, but numerous army bases, a well trained army, and a land mass 4 times that of iraq. While most Iranians are not fond or the current regime of mullahs, they would fight American invasion tooth and nail. They are a proud people who perceive their country as a once great nation that will be great again. Most are confident in their right to develop nuclear weapons for security reasons.

Likening an invasion of iraq with an invasion of iran is incredibly misleading. For an excellent study of the implications, read this report by Oxford Research Group:

http://www.iranbodycount.org/"

I've read it before, and my position is not an understatement. If the US military needed to it could easily defeat the ground forces of any dozen countries that you chose.

Iran's military capabilities simply do not measure up and how could they, they spend a tiny fraction of what the US military spends. We spend nearly as much as the rest of the World combined, including that of our allies. We have far more people, far better training, far better equipment and far more experience.

The US could literally commit genocide and kill every person in Iran and there would be nothing the Iranians could do to militarily prevent it.

Too many people are focusing on military engagements as if that is the salient issue and it is not. Military engagements alone do not win wars of the type that would be fought against Iran.

Killing every Iranian is certainly not the answer, not to mention being immoral.

I don't think a war against Iran is winnable. The military aspect we would certainly win, but as I've stated before, that doesn't win you the war.

The hard fighting would occur after a classic military engagement, and that is what we are ill prepared to win.

The US could be in Tehran within a week, but how does that help us anymore than it helped Napoleon to take Moscow? It doesn't, we could take but not really control the country.

When our crictiscm focus so heavily on military engagements it both strengthen the hands of the crazy war crowd and belittles the military. It's easy to refute charges that we wouldn't win a military engagement and thus the crazy war crowd ignore the more compelling arguments against conflict on what do in the post battle phase. It also makes it appear that we are anti US armed forces and consistently make needless attack on their capability.

None of that reduces the chance of a needless war.

Here's a simple irrefutable reason why striking Iran to eliminate its nuclear ambitions is futile. Let's assume that we destroy every single facility, completely obliterated, and Iran simply decides to do nothing in return but send us gift baskets of Persian chocolate and rebuilds it facilities again. What have we accomplished? Nothing except possibly enact a delay of months and at most a few years to their making a bomb. Are we to bomb Iran in perpetuity? No amount of military force can keep a country from developing the bomb short of eliminating the knowledge base of their scientific community. This means deliberately killing hundreds of thousands to millions of civilians, and that would be monstrous.

Xanthro:

Part of the reason why Iraq is a mess right now is because those who opposed the war presented arguments such as you are advancing right now that showed a lack of military understanding and when such scenarios did not occur, and it was obvious that they wouldn't, the self absorbed lunatics in this administration took that as "Look, see we were right all along.

---------------

Lord Wolf:

"no.

*the* reason why Iraq is a mess right now is because those who favored the war presented arguments that showed a lack of military understanding and when the rosy scenarios they described did not occur, and it was obvious that they wouldn't, the self-absorbed lunatics in the administration and their parrorts/drones in the american mainstream media kept saying "we're turning a corner" "the insurgency is its last throes!" "we're building schools!" "look -- they have purple fingers, freedom is reigning!" and when those who opposed the war said "look, see we were right along," we were accused of *wanting* the u.s. to fail and *wanting* to see americans and innocent iraqis die and suffer.

those of us who opposed the war and our arguments have sweet feck all to do with the current state of things in iraq.

---------------------

Sorry, our arguments do have sweet feck to do with the current situation in Iraq, because the argument was lost. Having lost the argument, we need to see why we lost and rectify our past mistakes.

Far too many people did play the "Stalingrad" card saying there would be tens of thousands of US killed. The military campaign played out exactly as would be expected, it was very predictable. The post military campaign equally played out as predicted by rational people and it is the far more important of the two, but because of so much emphasis on the military campaign and the anti-wars ridiculous arguments concerning how that would play out, the whole "We're turning the corner" and "the insurgency is in its last throes" was given more weight than such silly statements deserved.

If Bush is prepared to attack Iran, arguments such as Iran would win military engagements against the United States are not persuasive arguments because they are not true and it weakens the argument that is important. If we can’t control Iraq post battle how are we going to control Iran?

Do not give this administration straw men to tear down. Instead focus on the important issue which is military dominance does not guarantee winning the war.