[Terr_]

Also worth noting that Iran is generally a bigger and richer country than Iraq, whichever timeframe you look at.

To summarize in rough numbers:

* 2x the population (today)

* 3x the land area (today, but also probably back then)

* 7x the relative wealth (compared to Iraq-2002, using US GDP across time as a shared baseline)

I'm sure the US military has a much better statistical analysis... and I'm also sure it was ignored by the commander-in-chief.

[walrus01]

Iran is also considerably more mountainous than Iraq, if one looks at a topo map of Iraq and examines all the generally 'flat, somewhere generally near the Euphrates' area vs a population density map in people per square km. Yeah there's more complicated terrain in the northern part of the country, but nowhere on the size/scale of what exists in Iran.