[pluma]

Actually I can't think of many cases where German would use pronouns with countries. The reason these are masculine is because they are typically referred to using a definitive pronoun (literally "the Iraq", "the Iran", etc). It's more common with names of regions -- which may indicate that these countries used to be mere geographical regions (rather than sovereign nations) when the names entered the German language.

It also happens with countries like the UK, the US, the Czech Republic and so on, but obviously for the same reasons as in English.

I can't actually think of a country that's feminine in German. The "die" you often see is actually indicating plural (e.g. "die vereinigten Staaten", the United States; or "die Niederlande", "the Netherlands").

[schoen]

When you use pronouns for anaphora, would you use "es" for all countries, or is it plausible to imagine "er" or "sie", as with common nouns?

For example: Vor drei Monaten waren meine Mutter und ich in der Schweiz; wir haben _____ wirklich schön gefunden.

Would you accept "sie" here as a reference to Switzerland (because it was referred to as "die Schweiz"), or "es", or both? My intution is "es", but I'm not not a native speaker and non-native German speakers notoriously over-apply "es" to inanimate things.

[pluma]

I'd use "es" because it refers to the experience of being in Switzerland rather than the country itself.

But Switzerland is another example of a country that is typically used with an article. Consider the sentence "Ich fahre nach ____" with a country name. It doesn't work for countries like Switzerland ("nach Schweiz" sounds wrong, you'd instead say "in die Schweiz" -- same as "nach Kongo" vs "in den Kongo").

[schoen]

Thanks! Can we force the sentence to be about the country itself?

- Was meinen Sie über die Schweiz?

- ____ ist schön. / Ich finde ____ schön.