WI: The US invades Iran in 2003 instead of Iraq

Thr smartest thing to do is that the US gives independence to all the minorities in Iran. The Persians are like 50 percent of the population. Im sure the kurds, the Baluchis and the Azaries would love a country of their own.

I somewhat doubt that it would work as well as you think...
Because AFAIK a lot of the minority groups do consider themselves to be Iranian nevertheless...(I mean, you have Azaris as prominent political figures...).
Maybe it would work with that Balochis, but then Pakistan wouldn't be happy about that...
And don't the Iranian Kurds have less separatist sentiment than Kurds elsewhere?
 
Thr smartest thing to do is that the US gives independence to all the minorities in Iran. The Persians are like 50 percent of the population. Im sure the kurds, the Baluchis and the Azaries would love a country of their own.

I'm not entirely convinced Turkey would be happy with the idea of a Kurdish secure zone right on their border, with the Kurds there having access to serious hardware and apparently US backing.

I'm not entirely convinced the Baluchis would be happy with the idea of being cut free of Iranian actions to stop terror attacks from drug smugglers from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iran has done a lot of work in this region.

I'm not entirely convinced that the Kurds, Baluchis, and/or Azaries would particularly want independence. When I was in Iran (1999, a few years before the posited time frame), they seemed pretty content to be hyphenated Iranians. To be honest, the impression I got was that they pretty much regarded themselves as first and foremost Iranian.
 
When I was drafting this I considered that as well. Honestly my only answer is that what I wrote is the best case scenario for such a drive to Tehran. I don't think Fallujah level performance would actually be the norm. The Iranian Army and Paramilitary forces are an order of magnitude ahead of the Fallujah insurgents. They are better armed, trained, experienced and would have been waiting for this moment and campaign for decades of planning and logistics already set up. Every city the United States entered would be a meat grinder.

You can't compare the Battles of Fallujah to a full on conventional campaign where the media is in propaganda mode and the ROEs are basically do what it takes to win. The first battle of Fallujah was lost by video cameras and the European and Gulf media highlighting civilian dead.

The Battles of Fallujah were not quite major combat operations on the order of 2003 or 1991.
 

missouribob

Banned
You can't compare the Battles of Fallujah to a full on conventional campaign where the media is in propaganda mode and the ROEs are basically do what it takes to win.
If the Bush Administration doesn't have the political capital for a draft or didn't have the political power for such ROE/Propaganda in OTL they won't in this one. Congress is already divided enough on such a campaign as it is. This campaign for better or worse will be broadcast live. And even if the U.S. banned it's media that's not going to stop foreign media outlets at all, let alone Iranian Reporting.

The first battle of Fallujah was lost by video cameras and the European and Gulf media highlighting civilian dead.
Still going to happen here. This campaign will have minimum 200,000 dead Iranian civilians. There is nothing to stop European and Gulf media from doing the same in this ATL. If anything universal international hatred of this campaign will lead to even more reporting on it.
The Battles of Fallujah were not quite major combat operations on the order of 2003 or 1991.
Agreed.
 
If Iraq isn't occupied by the US, could Iranian insurgents use the Shia region of Iraq as a refuge? If so, how would Saddam feel about it? He may not like Iran, but the Ayatollah is gone now and the Americans are on his border. Would Shiite Iraq be to Iran what Cambodia/Laos was to the Vietnam War?
 
Come to think about it, Northeast Saudi Arabia has a high population of Shiites. Could this turn into a flash point as well?
 

missouribob

Banned
If Iraq isn't occupied by the US, could Iranian insurgents use the Shia region of Iraq as a refuge? If so, how would Saddam feel about it? He may not like Iran, but the Ayatollah is gone now and the Americans are on his border. Would Shiite Iraq be to Iran what Cambodia/Laos was to the Vietnam War?
Saddam would crush them with a mighty vengeance. The US would help on their side of US occupied Iran. Such an uprising might even lead to a limited IraqI-American coordination.

Come to think about it, Northeast Saudi Arabia has a high population of Shiites. Could this turn into a flash point as well?
It would. But all of those uprisings would be put down in 2003 I think. You'd also see an early second Lebanon War.
 
By my reckoning, we've managed to get the USA bogged down into a series of meat grinders resulting in huge Iranian civilian casualties, heavy Iranian military casualties, and major US military casualties (in the thousands, maybe reaching tens of thousands).

We've managed to get sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Syria, which is likely to spill over elsewhere and spiral totally out of control. In this situation, the growth of an organisation like ISIS is almost inevitable as there will be huge demand for some group promising protection at whatever cost. The suggestion that sectarian violence would be "easily put down" is a nonsense disproved by events in the region. Put it down in one place, and it pops up in another, and the level of hatred and determination to continue rises.

The Afghan situation has become more fraught, with Iran no longer involved in stemming the flow of drugs out and money (and weapons) in. Anyone involved in operations in Afghanistan is going to suffer badly.

India is looking on with horror as events in Afghanistan spiral out of control, and Pakistan starts flexing muscle in deniable support of Afghanistan.

Israel hunkers down and takes whatever action it deems necessary as the Lebanon goes into meltdown with a three-way conflict between Shia, Sunni, and Christian.

The USA has its eyes firmly fixed on the area, which leaves China with essentially a free hand in the South China Sea. I can't see China going much beyond heavy diplomatic and economic leaning, but the US allies in the area might not be entirely happy with the outcome. Russia becomes interested in Eastern Europe, testing what the boundaries are to its actions, which are likely to be slack with the USA distracted.

We've not even got into what is happening with the Kurds. Iranian Kurds are almost certainly likely to be fighting for Iran and against the USA. That is likely to lead to support from Turkish Kurds, which is likely to lead to Turkish action against them, which is likely to approach ethnic cleansing levels.

That's an optimistic analysis.
 
Saddam would crush them with a mighty vengeance. The US would help on their side of US occupied Iran. Such an uprising might even lead to a limited IraqI-American coordination.
Speaking of Saddam, would he try to move in the Shatt Al-Arab waterways and into Kuzestan, like he tried to do in 1980?
 

missouribob

Banned
Speaking of Saddam, would he try to move in the Shatt Al-Arab waterways and into Kuzestan, like he tried to do in 1980?
He would offer to do so to the United States but be rebuffed. Kuzestan would be the United State's main staging area for the push to Iran. Beyond minor border crossing incidents I think he'd leave it alone. Besides he would be pretty busy putting down his Shia and Kurdish uprisings on his side of the border.
 
Why the heck would the U.S. do that, though? After all, Saddam Hussein, not Iran's Ayatollah's, was the U.S.'s bete noir in the years leading up to 2003!
Iran was more anti-American than Iraq was. Keep in mind, this is the country where their leaders say 'Death to America' during their speeches. Bush could easily use this as a example of them supporting terrorism.
 
Iran was more anti-American than Iraq was. Keep in mind, this is the country where their leaders say 'Death to America' during their speeches. Bush could easily use this as a example of them supporting terrorism.

The Mullahs were having candle light vigils held around Iran after 911. They like Gaddafi legimitely saw and worried the US might topple the regime and took action to change the view of them as radical anti-American terror supporters.

2000s Iraq was not 1980s Iraq. Saddam was a demented tyrant too interested in sticking his finger in the eye of the US and writing his novel to realize the danger and Sunni Arab Iraq had deeply changed as well from the 80s or even 1990.

Iraq hails attack on US

The entire world - almost - has reacted with horror to the news of Tuesday's terrorist attacks against the United States - the entire world except for Iraq.

As condolences poured in from everywhere - even from Libya and Iran - Iraq rejoiced, saying the terror attacks were a "lesson for all tyrants and oppressors" and the fruit of American crimes. "America burns," read the headline of the country's official al-Iraq newspaper, which declared: "the myth of America was destroyed with the World Trade Center in New York."

Elsewhere in the Gulf, newspapers were unanimous in their condemnation of the attacks, but al-Iraq wrote: "It is the prestige, arrogance and institutions of America that burn." The paper said it would be difficult for the US to find the perpetrators of the attack, since America has made so many enemies. "Thousands if not a million or billion hands were behind these attacks," it said. "Brutal America, suffering from illusions of grandeur, has inflicted humiliation, famine and terrorism on all of the world's countries and today it reaps the fruits of its arrogant and stupid policy," said an official Iraqi statement.

The official statement, read on television Tuesday night, said: "the American cowboys are reaping the fruit of their crimes against humanity. "The statement said the attack was, among others, a result of America's support of Israel. "The destruction of the centres of American power is the destruction of American policy, which has veered from human values to align itself with the Zionist world, to continue to massacre the Palestinian people."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1540216.stm
 

cgomes

Banned
The Mullahs were having candle light vigils held around Iran after 911. They like Gaddafi legimitely saw and worried the US might topple the regime and took action to change the view of them as radical anti-American terror supporters.

2000s Iraq was not 1980s Iraq. Saddam was a demented tyrant too interested in sticking his finger in the eye of the US and writing his novel to realize the danger and Sunni Arab Iraq had deeply changed as well from the 80s or even 1990.

So much this. Western media does a lot to portray Iran as a bunch of idiotic fanatics. Fanatics they might be, but they are very far from being idiots.
 
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