Iran warmongering freaks me out more than just about any other Republican stupidity.

Even tons of liberals

think it'd be "another Iraq". Invading and occupying Iran would not be anything like Iraq. It'd be waaaaaaaaay
worse. For a quite a few reasons:
Lets look at who we'd be fighting. First of all Iraq had less than half the population of current day Iran. A ~third
of which are Kurds who were pretty much defacto independent and hostile to Saddam and Sunni militant groups
alike. The vast majority of those left were Shiites who don't join Sunni Islamist orgs and weren't exactly keen
on Saddam either. So the pool of people that were potentially recruitable by post-Saddam militant groups
probably consisted of 5 million people tops. Iran, on the other hand, pretty much have the Balochs, a few
million Kurds, and nobody else in the "would never join up with militants in a statistically significant way"
camp. So you're looking at a recruiting pool of, oh, lets say 60 million people. Who on average have a much,
much stronger sense of national identity than Iraqis do. This isn't some arbitrary chunk of land thats been
haggled over and passed around like an army camp hooker between half a dozen empires for the past 800 years.
Even the most "pro-western" Iranians are not going to be chill with being invaded. Also likely to be way better
armed.
Now lets look at the environments we'd be fighting in. Iraq at one point had a significant amount of forest and
swamps that might have been useful to hide out in. Less so at the time we invaded. Outside of Kurdistan, who
were cheering us on, Iraq is as flat as a pancake. Pretty much all Sunni Arab civilization in the country is
clustered around a handful of rivers. Between these rivers are exposed flatlands. There's no hiding out in the
wilderness here. The core cities are Shiite. It's honestly about as ideal a situation you could ask for to fight
against a Sunni insurgency.
Iran, well, lets see how the
population is distributed first.
Whereas Iraq had one giant
population cluster that pretty
much everything radiated out
from, Irans population is spread
out over quite a few regions.
Keep in mind Tehran alone is
significantly more populous than
Baghdad, and quite a few of
Iran's other cities are pretty big in
their own right. With rural
supporting populations to match,
which don't conveniently follow a
small number of rivers like they
do in Iraq.
Oh and lets talk about topography now, starting with the Tehran (circled in red) area:

Boy howdy what a fun place to fight a massive fucking insurrection in. And whats that on the other side of the
Alborz? Why its the jungles of Hyrcania! Some of the most dense forests in the world. This lovely combination
of landscapes is an insurgents wetdream and has made for some fun history.
Medieval accounts of struggles to bring the region to heel typically describe what we would today call guerrilla
warfare, in a time period where that wasn't much of a thing. Arab commanders marched armies in and their
mace-crushed skulls were thrown back out. Fun.
Ok so Tehran is a nightmare, what about that Esfahan place, surely it's not as bad? Conceded, its landscape isn't
as hostile as the Alborz:
The Zagros range is only as bad as most of Afghanistan. How about Tabriz?

How about some mountains? How bout Kermanshah?

How bout some more fucking mountains? Uh....Shiraz?

Pretty sure you knew the answer at this point. And the answer is fucking mountains.
Ok so you're looking at this topographic map of Iran and you notice that this Ahvaz place isn't in the Zagros
range and is in some nice flat-STOP! You remember all those marshes Iraq used to have? Well they're pretty
fucked up here too, but they still exist.
The poor fuckers who get sent here can get their very own Vietnam experience marching through the oil
polluted mudflats of Khuzestan! Which for the past while have also gone through a massive drought thats raised
a shit ton of dust storms, while not actually making the ground any less mudflatty.
Alright. What about that Mashhad place way up in the Northeast? It's Irans second biggest city and the
mountains seem less dense and and and-

No.
There's no relevant area where the terrain isn't hostile as fuck or would even grudgingly tolerate our presence
the way the Shiite areas of Iraq did. We'd probably lose more people in the initial government toppling than in
the entire War on Terror to this point. It'd be impossible to hold without massive Vietnam level death-tolls, and
even then I'm not actually sure we could. Due to having a million different fronts it'd be mind mindbogglingly
expensive, to the point that it might actually cause the US to go the way of the French Fourth Republic. Don't
fucking invade Iran.