Past wars have taught us that America’s threat to send a few thousand ground troops to Iran is an empty and dangerous fantasy, says world affairs editor Sam Kiley
You still can’t control the country because that’s not how that works with that gigantic population. Did the US control Afghanistan or even really Iraq? No. You can send in a lot of troops and make weird alliances and change local power structures in unpredictable ways, of course. But that’s different from control.
Then chicken out 20 years later and have the power vacuum immediately refilled by the people you were combating. Oh, and thanks for the millions of dollars worth of assets you leave behind.
There were ~400.000 German soldiers in nazi occupied Norway in 1945, a country with then a little less than 3 million people. Arguably even that didn’t really control the country.
You still can’t control the country because that’s not how that works with that gigantic population. Did the US control Afghanistan or even really Iraq? No. You can send in a lot of troops and make weird alliances and change local power structures in unpredictable ways, of course. But that’s different from control.
Then chicken out 20 years later and have the power vacuum immediately refilled by the people you were combating. Oh, and thanks for the millions of dollars worth of assets you leave behind.
There were ~400.000 German soldiers in nazi occupied Norway in 1945, a country with then a little less than 3 million people. Arguably even that didn’t really control the country.