Post a response to this discussion thread
Iraq was an unpopular dictatorship always on the verge of civil war if not actually in civil war and was never much of a stable country, hence the easiness in which we "defeated" them -- most of their people just didn't give a damn. They didn't really start giving a damn until American troops refused to leave, as apparently they wanted to clean up their own mess. Iran is another story entirely: it's been a fairly stable country with popularly elected (some might even say "Democratically elected" -- at least much more so than Hussein) leaders for quite a while. It's not like we'd be "bringing Democracy" to Iran like we supposedly did in Iraq. I think the war to beat them would take a hell of a lot longer and cost a lot more lives, and then after we did beat them, we'd set up a Democratic government -- and they would re-elect exactly the same people they just elected last year, but probably by much larger margins because we would have pissed off the supporters of the opposition as well for sticking our noses where they didn't think we belonged. Nuclear program or no nuclear program, I think most countries -- especially Arabic/Islamic countries -- would be much less supportive of an American or UN invasion of Iran than Iraq, which even if it didn't have any WMDs, none of us could argue against them being oppressed by an evil totalitarian regime.
We might also have trouble explaining why we invaded Iran for starting a nuclear program but did not invade North Korea (again) for doing the same thing.
Post a response to this discussion thread
And check this out: The Top Posters' Page