If you think Iran can be beaten militarily: Rent the Movie "Grass" (documentary set in Iran)

[Leopolds Ghost]

to learn about the mountains on the Iran-Iraq border and the people
(I think it was the Luri people) who still live there.

Much of the movie consists of entire villages climbing 10,000-ft peaks, barefoot, with their livestock in tow, hoisting them up with ropes, fording ice-cold raging rivers on inflatable rafts made out of animal skins, bearing their children on the side of the glacier, in order to reach the grazing area on the other side of the mountain (hence the title of the movie);

there being no passes, the entire village had been making this journey twice a year for thousands of years.

These are the people you would be fighting.

there being no passes, you would be fighting them largely on foot.

You may need to search it out on VHS, it was made in the 1920s.

It was the first documentary directed by a woman.

[madrchsod]

1. amazing movie----

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_(1925_film)
Grass (1925 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

people actually died in the river scene...

Merian Cooper,Ernest Schoedsack,and Marguerite Harrison.

merian cooper went on to make king kong

[Leopolds Ghost]

2. "Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life"

Thanks for the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_(1925_film)

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life is a 1925 silent documentary film which follows a branch of the Bakhtiari tribe of Iran as they and their herds make their seasonal journey to better pastures. It is considered one of the earliest ethnographic documentary films.
The film is Merian C. Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, and Marguerite Harrison's documentation of their journey from Angora (modern-day Ankara, Turkey) to the Bakhtiari lands of western Iran, in what is now the Chahar Mahaal va Bakhtiari province.

They then follow Haidar Khan as he leads 50,000 of his people and countless animals on a harrowing trek across the Karun River and over Zard Kuh, the highest peak in the Zagros Mountains. In filming the journey, Cooper, Schoedsack, and Harrison became the first Westerners to make the migration with the Bakhtiari.

The film highlights the extreme hardships faced by nomadic peoples, as well as the bravery and ingenuity of the Bakhtiari. At the same time, the film is also a reflection of the context out of which it emerged, that of Hollywood in the 1920s. Having heard about the first (commonly assumed) ethnographic documentary Nanook of the North's success, Cooper and Schoedsack set out for their own real life adventure. Like the Nanook, the central concern of Grass is to present primordial human struggle with harsh environments. The filmmakers attempt to document "timeless" and "ancient" human struggles, still observable in this part of the oriental world. The film has an engaging but deeply Orientalist tone in presenting the Bakhtiari as unchanging and archaic. When released, the film became a smash hit and was nominated for an academy award.

The documentary presents the filmmakers' travel as a narrative of a return to an ancient past: they turn the pages of history backwards until they get to "the very first page". Therefore what they present to the audience in the documentary is not a culture in the present, but a culture of the past!. In fact, they also portray this as their geneaological quest for their so-called Aryan origins of 3000 years ago. The film portrays Anatolian and Iranian peoples as continuously in a struggle for survival: the hunter on the Taurus mountains "does not hunt for sport, he kills for food". Therefore there is no space in these cultures anything outside of such survival strategies. Leisure, entertainment, sport etc belong to the social world of the West. The film also presents the Bakhtiari migration to Iranian highlands as if it was a one-time event, where several environmental difficulties stand in the way of the tribe, who spontaneously finds miraculous spur-of-the-moment solutions to overcome it (barefoot crossing of Zardeh Kuh, goat-skin floats at the river crossing, etc.). However, it is obvious that this trans-human activity was annually repeated and such technologies were developed over long time.

The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

Trivia

* The US Ambassador in Tehran who helped the film crew with their mission was killed in Tehran a few weeks after filming was completed.

* The success of Grass propelled Merian Cooper to the top in Hollywood. King Kong (1933) soon followed as a result.

* Marguerite Harrison was a spy of the American government who was a member of military intelligence, and twice arrested by CHEKA/KGB.

* Merian Cooper was also allegedly a spy who spent two years in Lubyanka.

[Leopolds Ghost]

3. Correction: Bakhtiari, not Luri

Not to be confused with Baluchi, whom we are already fighting in
Afghanistan.

The Bakhtiari and Luri (turkic-speaking) peoples live in the
mountain passes on the Western Iranian border, between
Kurdestan and the oil-rich province of Khuzestan.

Khuzestan is a flat region on the border of Iraq, near Basra.
It is surrounded by high mountains which Saddam was never able
to penetrate.

[Jeffersons Ghost]

4. K&R! ghost bro' will you please help with this...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=3153291&mesg_id=3160751

[Leopolds Ghost]

7. Sure, Done! n/t

[Malikshah]

5. Great doc- but the subtitle... Yo Ali got us all tittering when we

saw it back in the nineties at a film festival.

Transhumance at its best, though.

[cool user name]

6. Very interesting ... thanks for posting.

Fuck, I hope we don't invade Iran and ruin more people's lives.

:(

[Leopolds Ghost]

8. Anyone else see this movie?

[kineneb]

14. didn't need to

I lived in Tehran for a year and my step-father's family is Persian. I know exactly what the terrain is like. Iran is lots larger and far more mountainous than Iraq.

for our fellow DUers, try this photo

not what I would call a great hiking location...rather barren.

[Leopolds Ghost]

20. Combines the mountains of Afghanistan with the urban centers of Iraq.

I guess the generals are looking for a place where they can perfect their tactics in those other locations.

Sort of a Winter Olympics of warfare.

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

32. saw it on TCM a few times

[Leopolds Ghost]

9. bump

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

10. The people interested in a military attack on Iran...

aren't interested critical thinking, IMHO.

Thanks for the recommendation though.

[Leopolds Ghost]

11. They need to take a course in geography. For instance, Iran is too big to be traversed

by fighter pilots and too mountainous to be assaulted by tanks.

When we invaded Iraq, not a single bridge was successfully blown
by Saddam's retreating armies, because most of them did not plan
on fighting us until -AFTER- Saddam was "taken care of".

Even if we take the southwestern corner, where all the oil is,
Iran still has sea access to the Tenghiz oil-field, through
airspace and contracts that are now Russian-controlled, thanks
to global alienation from the U.S.

Tehran sits on the flanks of a high mountain range that is
bristling with anti-aircraft bunkers.

If we assault Iran head-on, we end up in the Bakhtiari region
where the movie "Grass" was shot. Like assaulting the Himalayas.

It is far easier for Iran to equip and deploy millions of light
infantry mujahedeen from the cover of these mountains, and send
them over the border into the homes of fellow Shi'ites in Amarah,
Hillah, Baqubah, Samarrah, Babel, and Sadr City.

Most of the tribal lands between Northern Iraq and Northern Iran --
where US Special Forces can most easily reach actual Iran cities --
is controlled by Kurdish smugglers.

who are just as likely to play both sides, instead of making enemies for their newfound independent country.

If we invade northern Iran where the Kurds live, we may end up
fighting Azeris and Chechens in the mountains around Tabriz.

The local Kurds will either administer the liberated portion of Iran on our beahalf, thus inflaming the Azeris and Persian civilians to attack us, or we will put Iraqi Kurds in charge, causing the native Kurds to side with Iran against us which would shut down the US advance entirely; or the Kurds would attack each other; or the Kurds would most likely reach a side agreement and remain neutral, allowing Russian-funded Azeri and Iranian irregulars to duke it out with us in the mountains like we are doing in Afghanistan, and smuggling in weapons for all sides.

If we just breeze past the Kurdish lands into the Persian homeland, we will run up against the situation France and Germany had when they extended their supply line deep into Russia.

Only we'd be cut off, on the other side of the Zagros Mountains, with limited air support and no secure supply lines and a bunch of cities to besiege with millions of Persians living in each one.

Russia would welcome the opportunity to export Chechen violence
away from its borders, along with Azeri oil and weapons from
the nearby port of Baku.

The ensuing chaos would give Iranian Kurds easy permission to
invade Turkey from the mountains of Western Iran, with funding
by the Iraqi Kurds.

Turkey would not be able to retaliate against Iran because of our aggression.

The Iraqi Kurds would have to be protected by a Maginot Line
of US troops extending from Aleppo, Syria to Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Since Syria would be allied to Iran, we would end up in a race to meet Israel in Damascus, like we raced to meet the Soviets behind the Elbe.

Once we got there, we'd be forced to hunker down as an army of Hezbollah guerrillas from both sides of the Lebanese border rained down rockets on us from the mountains of the neutral country of Lebanon.

With the US forces occupying multiple countries, it would be difficult to play the remnants of Al Qaeda off against the Sunni nationalists, Baathists, and Bedouin tribes who control much of Al-Anbar province.

Instead, Al Quaeda would gain enough support to have a new base of operations along the Syrian-Iraq border adjacent both to US forces and the holy lands, just as we were warned about.

Al Qaeda would declare the Sunni "federal region" (Al Anbar and Saladin provinces) to be the start of an Islamic Caliphate, and encourage terrorist attacks on our forces all up and down the Euphrates river valley, not to mention invading Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Saudis would likely respond by paying off Al Qaeda, to attack US troops instead. They are probably doing this already.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

12. They need to take a course in the 7th grade.

As soon as they pass the 6th.

[Leopolds Ghost]

13. Are you saying you don't believe it will ever happen?

Please read the edits/additions to my previous post.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

25. No, I don't think it will happen.

But if it does, I don't think it's because the people in charge are rational human beings.

[pettypace]

15. Ominous ramifications aside

that was a splendid rendering of the possible course of actions. It would make for a great film to watch play out from the comforts of ours homes here in the States. A modern day war on two fronts akin to your examples of WW II.

K&R

[Leopolds Ghost]

17. Or five fronts, albeit weak enemies, but we would be occupying an entire region that hates us.

1. Shiite Iraq -- funded by Iranians. Triple the current battle losses INSIDE Iraq by bringing 60% of the population into play. Half of the ground battles from any war on Iran would be fought INSIDE Iraq.

2. Sunni Iraq -- funded by Saudis, including Al Qaeda (pay no attention to the Saudis...)

2. Sunni Syria -- same front as Sunni Iraq, double your occupation, and double the field of play on which Al Qaeda gets to operate (still think Bush really wants to destroy Al Qaeda?) including Damascus with its many suburban townships, and a deep resentment of being invaded by Europeans numerous times over the past 3,000 years.

3. (GI) Joe vs. the Volcano -- US forces holed up in Khuzestan, protecting oil wells that are staffed by Shi'ite (or Pakistani) labor, being shelled by long-range SSMs from the 10,000 foot peaks separating them from the rest of Iran.

Translation -- the enemy (Iran) has already breached whatever battle-front we are thinking about setting up. The border of Iran faces a mountain range which is near-impenetrable to heavy armor, but easily penetrable by foreign fighters on foot. (Remember, the border crossings are guarded by Shi'ites.) It would be a borderless war of us pinned up against a mountainous wilderness, bottled up in the oil region of Khuzestan, with the enemy hiding behind a privileged position, just like Vietnam. Meanwhile, all the labor to get the oil wells restarted would come from Shi'ite Iraqis in Basra, so the Iranians could infiltrate Basra (they already have) and snipe our forces throughout the rear, just like the Viet Cong did.

3. The other part of this front would be US Special Forces and Iraqi PeshMerga fighters ranging all over Iranian province of Kurdestan, blowing up (take your pick, depending on how loyalties shake out) Iranian Kurds who dislike Iraqis venturing into their turf, Iranian Azeris wielding Russian weapons from Azerbaijan who have mysterious reasons for not rising up to greet their liberators (reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Russia, of course) or 10,000 Persian suicide squads (while the Kurds and Azeris sit out and wait to see who wins). Since we can't get serious armor over the hump, no actual front or territorial progression would occur. Think Cambodia, complete with helicopter strikes and extractions, or Bosnia, complete with imported Chechen terrorists brought in by Iran.

4. Afghanistan -- MSNBC says that the Taliban -- those guys are so 2001 -- are planning to cut the road between Kandahar and the capital. Meanwhile, Osama seems to have died of kidney failure and Al Qaeda supporters in the Pakistani ISI have put up nice little retirement homes for their friends in Al Qaeda. "Hey, man, it's like the Weather Underground, dude." In 20 years, they'll come out of hiding from their retirement chateaus and negotiate a plea bargain with President Mary Cheney, just like Bush arranged for H.Q. Khan.

5. US versus Turkey "peacekeeping" operation along the Iraq/Syrian border to keep Turkey from invading the lands we're occupying. The Kurds would go around.

5. Iranian Kurds versus Turkey -- funded by the Iraqi Kurds, who are the only group with any money -- on the Turkish side of the US line. Same front, different side. Under cover of a war inside Iran, Kurds would be able to stream over the border and into the mountainous area around Lake Van. We would probably run out of troops and let the Turks invade Iraq and Syria to "punish" the Iraqi Kurds for funding the Iranian Kurds to liberate the Turkish Kurds. This is one possible scenario. Another is that the Kurds start fighting among themselves, allowing a Turkish bloodbath of Kurds. A third is that the Turks invade the Iranian province of Kurdestan -- highly unlikely under color of US invasion. Which is why I think it's so very likely that Iranian Kurds will take the opportunity to do the reverse and attack Turkey, since they would have nothing to lose. That way the actual independent state of Kurdistan in northern Iraq can claim no responsibility and hide behind US forces.

(I am secretly rooting for the Kurds, they are our only allies in the region. The Turks have oppressed and killed all the ethnic Kurds and Christian Armenians and Greeks in Turkey, creating a state that is -- on paper -- 100% Sunni and 100% Turk, much like, after 500 years of racism and oppression, half of Mexicans claim to be descendants of Castilian Spanish and less than a third claim to be of Indian descent.)

[Leopolds Ghost]

18. Oh, I forgot 6. Hezbollah, Shi'ites, Palestinians in the mountains of Lebanon

Are unlikely to take kindly to the invasion of Syria's population center which sits 30 miles from the Bekaa valley.

Of course we could take neutral Lebanon while we're at it, like the fascists did to Belgium, and wipe Hezbollah out completely. The reason Israel couldn't defeat Lebanon is that they didn't want to risk war with Syria by bringing in troops to the border region between the three countries.

According to the "New Map of the Middle East" that the War College was
playing with, they want to piece off the Christian and Druze part of Syria into some sort of Crusader kingdom.

(Two interesting movies about the Palestinians and Druze in the area are _The Syrian Bride_, about a Druze family in the Golan Heights, and _Private_ about a Palestinian family whose house is used to quarter Israeli soldiers, just as we are doing every day in Iraq -- an action that liberal constitutional scholars claim is a "dead letter" constitutional amendment in the US constitution that is no longer needed because "nobody quarters soldiers any more." I heard it on TV!)

The moderates who run Lebanon and the West Bank (you know, "terrorist symps" like Palestinian negotiator Saed Erekat and Lebanese PM Fouad Siniora) are moderately secular, educated urban Sunnis.

The Druze and Christians mostly (but not all) dislike Hezbollah, with their fundamentalist Islamic politics. But they do support Fatah and the Arab nationalists, because the Arab nationalists wanted to drive the Israelis out of Golan (where many Druze live) and the West Bank (where Arab Christians are persecuted just as badly as Arab Muslims).

(Saddam's biggest support was among Arab Christians and Assyrians, who knew that they would be persecuted and wiped out by the Shi'ites and Kurds. Similarly, Arab Christians support Fatah because their communities have been destroyed by Israeli settlers and Islamic fundamentalists, neither of whom recognize Christianity as a legitimate religion in the territories.)

I suppose to placate the Christians, we could put the Phalangists back in charge of Lebanon and create a sort of Crusader kingdom that would be willing to massacre people in order to stay in power, like the Israelis supported in the late 1970s. Given his recycling of old 1970s foreign policy mistakes, Bush seems to view that era as some sort of golden age for Republican ideas.

[bullwinkle428]

36. If they're not interested in learning differences between Sunni & Shia,

then it's a lost cause to expect them to digest the kind of info you're sharing. I certainly appreciate it, though; thanks for sharing with us.

[generaldemocrat]

16. Iran can't be beaten militarily, but it can be economically.

When you have a country whose sole means of living revolves around oil, then well...........it is economically vulnerable.

[Leopolds Ghost]

19. What is the definition of victory? You can't "starve into submission" a country of 70 million

When you can't get your mechanized armor over the mountain passes because of waves of ill-trained, starving Persians who care more about the territorial integrity of their nation than they do about overthrowing their authoritarian, but democratically elected President?

Saddam tried it once. He invaded and held Khuzestan for 10 years.

Iran "lost" the war and had to sue for peace -- after 10 years of sending waves of human bombs over the mountains to chew up the Iraqi forces, who couldn't get over the mountains.

Perhaps the military has a secret plan for getting ground forces into Tehran by means other than paratrooping.

I suppose we could sieze the Tehran airstrip and hold it against constant bombardment from the Elburz mountains, in the heart of a bombed-out, but non-liberated metropolitan area of 7 million Iranians.

What happens if Russian tankers in the Caspian start selling oil to Tehran via Baku, in return for future oil credits?

[Leopolds Ghost]

21. bump

Two movies set in the mideast which I recently saw that are also interesting:

In addition to "Grass" they are:

"The Syrian Bride"

"Private"

[Leopolds Ghost]

22. It's too bad none of the people who "aren't worried about an attack on Iran" have discussed this.

Too many DUers think "that would be terrible if we attacked another country, but it's not like it would involve ground troops, and if we did, Iran would fall easily."

[kineneb]

23. I try to educate folks here

but I guess that geography is not an American long suit. All one needs to do is look at a topo map of the area to realize that Iran has a challenging landscape. Tehran is on a plateau that is above 3000' elevation- the entire country could be termed "high desert". And it is about double the size of Iraq, with a much larger population. And there are still nomadic tribes there.

BushCo may think that superior fire power would defeat the Iranian people, but they sadly underestimate both the population and the environment. Unlike Iraq, the Iranian people are nationalistic. They deeply believe in the concept of a sovereign Persia, whatever its modern name may be, and in spite of whatever type of government it has. Americans forget that Persia/Iran has been an independent country for the last 2,500 years! And contrary to popular thinking, they are not likely to resort to the sectarian violence seen in Iraq, because of this internalized view of nationality. The Kurds might want to break away, but they are only in the far north-west of the country.

[Solon]

28. Americans underestimate nations other than the U.S. as a matter of course...

Mostly because, outside of World Wars One and Two, we picked on nations that were smaller than we are, and usually on decline or divided themselves. Even then, not all our "adventures" were successful, Vietnam and Iraq are examples of that. Iran, on the other hand, has ideal terrain, a military, and a will to fight us if necessary.

Any attempt at an invasion will be repelled, air raids may not even be that successful, the most practical way to attack Iran is with missile attack, but, even with our "high tech" shit, all that would do is piss them off. If we talk about actually "winning" against Iran, the only practical way would be to depopulate the nation, a nice word for genocide, and the quickest way to do that is to use nuclear weapons.

I put winning in quotes because I believe that any "victory" we celebrate, if you can call it that, would be very short, 15 minutes to a half hour, 45 minutes, at most, before most cities here are destroyed by Russia in retaliation for the Fallout they would get.

[coffeenap]

24. And for those of us who want to be reminded about how human

these humans are, see "Secret Ballot". A lovely movie about voting, among other things. I will never understand why an entire country can be turned into "the enemy". Never.

[etherealtruth]

26. I don't think attacking Iran Militarily is a wise /sane/moral idea ....

However, I appreciate the info about the movie.

[rinsd]

27. Anyone can be beaten militarily. Its the occupying that is a problem.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

29. America could beat Iran militarily very easily indeed, if that was all it wanted to do.

What it clearly couldn't do is beat Iran without killing at a minimum tens of thousands, and probably millions, of innocent people.

[Leopolds Ghost]

30. How do you beat or occupy a country that is the size of Western Europe

without engaging in total war, i.e. ground troop occupation of every village?

Japan was not defeated until we dropped the atom bomb. And they were an island besieged by US troops.

Anyone who's seen "The Fog of War" knows that we had wiped out dozens of Japanese cities, killing the equivalent in population of Cincinnati or Albuquerque in each one. The Japanese were still prepared to resist until their Emperor said it was over. They were that fervent. Oh, and they had been cut off from their oil supply years before, one of the underlying conditions for the war in the Pacific was a fight over the oil supply needed to control the Pacific.

The main difference between Japan and Iran seems to be that Iran is ten times the size of Japan and has committed slightly fewer atrocities, for which it is less willing to apologize.

[hack89]

40. Who said anything about occupation?

I think the goal would be to use air and missile strikes to:

1. destroy nuclear sites

2. destroy Iranian military infrastructure (air bases, radar sites, naval bases, arms factories, etc)

3. destroy Iranian air force and navy

4. destroy Iranian oil infrastructure.

Not saying it is wise or even possible but I don't see the Pentagon invading Iran. They want to stop nuclear production and weaken Iran.

[Leopolds Ghost]

41. Bush? Destroy Iranian oil infrastructure?

Our civilian leadership will demand that we SECURE Iranian oil infrastructure.

Especially since it sits on the opposite side of the river from the Iraqi Shi'ite city of Basra (pop. 1 million.)

Too tempting a target.

Too bad the plain of Khuzestan, formerly known as Elam (the Biblical Garden of Eden) is surrounded by high mountains bristling with old fortifications left over from the Iran/Iraq war days.

Also, we will have to invade the 1,000 miles rugged Iranian coast in order to take out the Sunburn missiles hidden in deep bunkers.

Remember "The Guns of Navarone"?

The entire Gulf sea lanes, including undersea oil fields owned by the Gulf states, is within striking distance of land-based anti-ship and anti-tank missiles.

So right there you have to secure 1,000 miles of depopulated coastal wilderness, plus Khuzestan, and guard the mountain passes from incursions by Persians.

Many of whom have relatives in the Shi'ite south of Iraq.

Iran doesn't even need to worry about losing territory, their unconventional forces are already stationd inside Iraq.

Currently, they are telling their Iraqi Shi'ite allies to refrain from attacking us, and concentrate on attacking the Sunnis.

The Neocons call this the "80% solution" because they want a friendly Shi'ite Arab state comprised of 80% of Iraq's population, to own 80% of the Gulf oil reserves trough irredentist secession of parts of Saudi Arabia and Khuzestan.

This wealthy Shi'ite state would be a client of the US and spur -- though preexisting trade contacts and oil -- democratic revolution amongst their Shi'ite neighbors in Iran.

Too bad the Iraqi Shi'ite exiles, who spent the past 20 years promising Reagan's and Bush's people that the 80% solution would transform the entire Middle East, turned out to be Iranian double agents (Hakim, Chalabi).

[Leopolds Ghost]

42. I am still hearing comments about how "we will bomb them from afar"

"A moral disaster, to be sure."

Except...........

We AREN'T "afar"!!!!

Our troops are right across the border from Iran's major oil producing region,

and our supply lines are within 100 miles of the Iranian border from the Strait of Hormuz all the way to Sadr City.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

46. Right.

Just like we beat the insurgents.

Oh, wait...

[La Lioness Priyanka]

31. even terrain wise iran wil be impossible...

[teryang]

33. Lt. Col. (ret.) Tony Cordesman published an Iran Order of Battle

It is eigthy three pages long and describes the Iranian military industrial complex and its armed forces in intricate detail. It also explains how the Iranians learned bitter lessons from the Iraq-Iran war and how it developed a two tiered approach to national defense, developing its own parts and weapons production capabilities for self reliance, understanding the conventional superiority of the US and building the most technically sophisticated and largest unconventional forces in the world, given limited conventional capabilities.

If one understands the commitment, sophistication and toughness of the Iranian unconventional forces, it would be too costly for the US to engage Iran without nuclear weapons. The US would essentially have to resort to wholesale genocide to win such a conflict. An attempt to subdue Iran without using nuclear weapons would ultimately result in a US withdrawal from the area. This is not Cordesman's opinion but my own. Cordesman thinks war with Iran a poor idea.

on edit: it's not published yet technically, it's a draft with copyright warnings.

http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/060728_gulf_iran.pdf


The Gulf Military Forces in an Era of Asymmetric War

Anthony H. Cordesman and Khalid R. Al-Rodhan

[Strelnikov_]

37. Looks Interesting. Thanks For The Link

The conventional wisdom of the typical prole seems to be that Iran's performance during the Iran-Iraq war is indicative of their current capabilities. They forget that Iran, when attacked by Iraq, had a greatly degraded military due to the revolution.

It is kind of like assuming the Soviet Union would be a pushover in 1941 because of their performance in the Polish-Soviet war in 1920.

[teryang]

38. Check out his lessons learned from Israeli-hezbollah war

it's at the same web site, revised Sep 06. High tech, low profile, net centric war with light armaments. Many of the most advanced techniques are from Iran. Saturation tactics with anti tank guided missiles. Ten meter deep tunnels unaffected by 15,000 IDF sorties. Iranian techniques evade IDF electronic warfare methods. This is what the average American can't even begin to understand or bother to read about the ineffectual tactics of western forces as viewed by the east.

The west emphazises air forces and strike tactics and thinks the job is done if it looks like everything is blown up. It's so much deeper than that. Get this LTC C says that the average Hezbollah combatant was better trained for combat engagement than the IDF soldier and that this reflected the training by Iranian unconventional forces.

[Leopolds Ghost]

39. And Iran still managed to destroy Iraq's will to fight, setting em up for Gulf War I

Saddam was able to sieze and hold Khuzestan, the oil producing region we want to liberate, for a good 10 years.

His tanks got bogged down in the foothills while Iran sent waves and waves of conscripts over the front lines on foot.

Iran was exhausted and their economy destroyed by being cut off from oil for 10 years, but it was a totally Pyrrhic victory for Saddam.

And the Iran-Iraq war was actually responsible for Khomeini siding with the hard-liners and driving out or torturing the leftists and liberals.

[Leopolds Ghost]

45. I just read this, and it does not sound the way you describe -- it sounds like a puff piece for war.

Conventional forces are described in great detail, and anything not known about Iran's conventional forces is treated dismissively as "probably because they don't know shit about equipping and maintaining conventional armor, after all they are a totalitarian dictatorship with un-motivated soldiers and uneducated scientists, right?" It also describes Iran as a "Third World" country whose armor is rusty, non-mobile, and exposed to enemy fire.

Then, half the report is devoted to CBRN capacity, and all of a sudden, everything not known about Iran's CBRN capacity is chalked up to expert Iranian counterintelligence and rapidly progressing Iranian tunneling capacity and technological might. Sound familiar?

It also claims Iran has NO Sunburn missiles and that any it does have are based off-shore (which would be a ridiculous strategic mistake on Iran's part, if true.)

It goes on to assert that any Iranian counter-attack would be done by CBR or terrorist means. This is circular logic -- the same logic employed by the Bush Administration to justify the Iraq war ("since we're attacking them because of their CBRN program and support for Al-Qaeda, they're sure to use it against us.")

The report goes further than the Bush administration, suggesting that Al-Zarqawi's group Al Qaeda in Iraq is likely to be used as a "proxy force" for Iran.

Zarqawi wasn't even aligned with Iraq! He was aligned with a breakaway group of religious Kurds. He then aligned with radical Sunni extremist in Anbar province and fomented the murder of all Shi'ites and the destruction of their temples, presumably including the temples in Qom.

[LynnTheDem]

34. If ya think we're LOSING in IRAQ -and we certainly are- just wait!

Iraq was one of the most defenseless nations on the planet with no navy, no airforce, and a very sad little army.

Iran isn't.

[LynnTheDem]

35. Iran; A Bridge Too Far

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7147.htm

[GreenZoneLT]

43. Yeah, but those people aren't "Iranian"

In that, they're basically independent of the central government and don't like them. They'll fight you if you come into their territory, but they don't have anything to do with the Iranian military, who are mostly flatland city boys like everyone else's military.

All you need to know about Iran as a military problem is a map. It's about four times the size of Iraq, with a lot more mountains. Fuggedaboudit. We could destroy the Iranian military machine from the air without too much trouble, (they'd probably plaster the hell out of Baghdad and Tel Aviv with missiles, but they couldn't stop us). But what would that do but lead them to turn to terrorist attacks? Great, add Hezbollah to Al Qaeda; what a brilliant strategy.

We sure as hell couldn't occupy the place, without a draft and 2-3 million ground troops that would take at least three years to recruit, train and equip. Even Dick Cheney's not stupid enough to propose we invade them with ground forces.

[Leopolds Ghost]

44. I don't see how you bomb Iran without ending up in the same situation Saddam ended up in.

Only we wouldn't have control over "our" Shi'ites behind the front lines.

[Leopolds Ghost]

47. I'm bumping this thread because people continue to post ignorant statements about Iran

And this thread contains a lot of interesting information on Iranian geography and culture.

When someone posts a thread pointing out how urbanized and modern Iran is, they are accused of cherry-picking

or folks say "well that's not most of the country"

which is quite right.

Just like in America, if you plan on invading the back-country to get to the cities, you have to get past the "mountain men". And their mountain men have a greater capacity for suffering than our mountain men.

Saying the mountain men will side with us because they hate the urbanized, educated Persians is like saying our mountain men would side with the Soviet invaders because they hate the federal government.

Put the Bakhtiari or the Iranian Kurds up against our National Guard and see how long it takes for them to get to a Persian city.

It would not be a good idea.

And once they got to a Persian city and realized they had been occupying dirt while a dozen cities of a million or more awaited them...?