An Occupation of Iran? A Second Look at the Numbers--and Much Else

In the discussion of the various estimates some observers have made of just what a territorial occupation of Iran would involve, I have seen some object that attempting to base one on an analogy between Iran and 2003 Iraq, for example, is a crude method--implying that these may overestimate the troop requirements.

The objection can run that Iran is not evenly peopled. Much of the nation is uninhabitable--a quarter of it nearly uninhabited salt flat and desert in the center. The twenty-one provinces to the west of this desert-dominated center, comprising less than half the country by area, contain about five-sixths of the population; while Tehran province, and four of its adjoining provinces (Qom, Mazandaran, Alborz, Markazi), a little under six percent of the territory, contain almost thirty percent of the population.

This may seem to make the task easier by suggesting less territory actually has to be covered. However, Iran--a country, again, comparable to Western Europe in size--is vast enough that even occupying a portion of it would be a daunting task. The densely peopled Tehran-centered area discussed above is by itself still markedly greater in extent and population than the U.S. occupation zone in post-war Germany.1 And the bigger western region discussed here is, in territorial extent, about three times bigger than the whole of West Germany then. (It is also twice the size of the portion of Iraq not consisting of uninhabited desert.2)

The result is that this area alone would still be enough to plausibly require millions of soldiers.3 And the fact remains that the rest of the country could not be ignored given the significant populations further east, not least the nation's second-largest city, Mashhad, near the border with Turkmenistan. The physical fragmentation of this vast territory by the large uninhabitable space in the middle, and its multiple mountain chains (in which Iran resembles Italy more than Germany, yet another complicating factor), is likely to pose particular challenges for a force coming in from the outside with heavy mechanized units, and attempting to use troops efficiently through a rapid-reaction plan rather than a wide scattering of garrisons. (It also does not help that the densest and strategically most significant population cluster, the aforementioned one centering on Tehran, is deep within the country's interior, hundreds of miles inland from the Iraqi border, or the Persian Gulf.)

Still, for all the challenges posed by the country's large and mountainous territory, perhaps the most significant of all is the intensive urbanization at which this population distribution hints--already noted, but perhaps worth underlining here. Over half of the Iranian population lives in the country's nearly one hundred cities of 100,000 people or more; a quarter in just the eight cities home to a million or more. The capital Tehran has a population of 9 million, and 15 million in the metro area--nearly a fifth of the nation. No army has ever attempted a military occupation of an urban area this size. (Baghdad at the time of the invasion, for example, had a population just half the size of Tehran's--and on top of this Iran has two additional 2003 Baghdad equivalents, the Mashhad and Isfahan areas with 3-4 million each.)

All of this reinforces rather than debunks the argument that a force a multiple of what it would have taken to control Iraq, or which it did take to control America's portion of post-war Germany or Japan, would be required for an occupation of larger, more urbanized Iran--even before one thinks of the political complexities of the situation nationally and regionally, about which it might be appropriate to say another word.

Perhaps the most obvious matter is that Iran is considerably less subject to the kinds of ethno-religious divisions that Iraq was. This may seem an advantage given their contribution to the considerable bloodshed that followed regime change in that country. However, it made some aspects of that regime change easier. Certainly there is nothing comparable to the semi-detachment of Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion, and the U.S. alliance with Kurdish forces there; or the conflict between Shiites in the south and the Sunni center, which did not translate to such easy cooperation as in the case of the Kurds, but which meant a less united opposition to the post-Saddam regime. Indeed, where in Iraq an ethno-religious minority (Sunni Arabs) was in control, in Iran the majority ethnic group (Persians, over half the country) is politically dominant, while the country is relatively homogeneous in religion (ninety percent Shiite).

There is, too, the situation outside the country's borders. As I noted previously, local opposition in the wake of a successful invasion could find support among populations in neighboring states like Iraq--which might provide refuge and much else. (As the situation stands now Iran is affiliated with militias in many a neighboring country. Can it be imagined that they would totally stay out of such a fight?) Potentially more significant, however, there is the question of Russia, too little acknowledged in discussions of such a scenario. Given Iran's sharing the shores of the Caspian Sea, and borders with Russian-aligned Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, it is very easy to imagine such a conflict becoming--like the wars in Georgia, the Donbass, and Syria--a proxy war between Russia and the U.S.. All of this would not only make any post-occupation conflict more difficult, but contribute to the continued worsening of U.S.-Russian relations, and the danger of their military confrontation escalating.

Still, what may be more significant than all this is, of course, the point that David Edelstein has made in regard to territorial occupations. Critics of occupations like that of Iraq in 2003 are not wrong to point to the lack of local knowledge, planning and inadequate resourcing of the occupying force that so quickly turned the situation disastrous (unreadable as anything but the extreme wishful thinking and extreme incompetence of the neocons and their fellow travelers) but (as Machiavelli pointed out in The Prince a half millennium before Edelstein took up the subject) the task of changing regimes is about as difficult as a political job gets. It is worse when the one changing the regime is an outsider who blew up a lot of stuff and killed a lot of people to get there, and has to do unpleasant things to stay where people did not want them to begin with.

Unsurprisingly, as Edelstein showed empirically in his two-century survey of territorial occupations in his 2004 article on the subject in International Security (same issue this appeared in, by the way) occupations--measured by the standard of whether they not merely keep violence to an acceptable minimum during their stay, but whether they achieve their political goals in more enduring fashion--usually fail, even when not being overseen by the likes of a Donald Rumsfeld and company. Indeed, just about the only thing that can make them work out (and this, Machiavelli did not anticipate) is if occupier and occupied are drawn together by a mutual fear of a third party greater than any hostility they have to each other.

This is pretty much unimaginable where Iran today is concerned. And no one who presumes to discuss the issue should forget it.

1. The U.S. had 1.6 million troops in Germany on V-E Day, over 300,000 in its zone a year later, while some four hundred thousand Western troops covered West Germany as a whole. Apportioning that to the areas discussed here, some half million would be needed for the densely peopled five-province west-central area alone, 1.2 million troops for the western part of the country.
2. Properly manning the occupation of Iraq in 2003 would, according to one estimate made at the time, have required 800,000 troops. Doubling that translates to 1.6 million troops for western Iran.
3. See notes 1 and 2.