Testing123
25d ago
As far as anyone can tell, the US government is currently considering military action against Iran. Surely a factor in whether that occurs is the population of Iran. There are many direct and indirect differences between bombing a country with a population of 90 million and 5 million. The population has ramifications for the number of deaths, the economic impact on the country and region, potential refugees, potential enemy combatants, and many other variables.
As a basic conceptual matter, I can't take someone's commentary on a country seriously unless they at the very least have a rough sense of the country's population, GDP, GDP per capita, major religious groups, major ethnic groups, and basic government structure.
I'm finding this response - which is echoed by a few others on this thread - really strange and hard to wrap my head around.
Even if the population of Iran has little-to-no bearing on whether military intervention is wise, it still has major implications on a million other relevant variables that accompany military intervention, like the death toll, the economic impact, the refugees, the counter attack, etc. Ceteris Paribus, using strategic bombing to stop a country with the population of Slovakia (5 million) from getting a nuke has very different ramifications than using strategic bombing from stopping a country the size of Indonesia (population 280 million) from getting a nuke. If Jakarta is wiped off the map and the government of Indonesia collapses overnight, it could tank the economy of southeast Asia and lead to millions of refugees flooding borders and tens of thousands of deaths in chaos and mass civil war, etc.
Even if you shrug and respond, "I don't care, I just don't want Indonesia to get nukes at all costs," it's still worth understanding the ramifications of that policy. You should have a sense of what carrying out this policy entails, what its costs will be, and what sort of secondary effects it will have, and all of these factors will in-part depend on the country's population. And it's not like national population figures are esoteric statistical knowledge or something; it's really basic info about a country.
I feel like I'm talking to someone who confidently declares that he doesn't care about prices when selecting a restaurant, and then I point out that prices will impact the cost of going to the restaurant and prices are strong indicators of food quality and decorum and may indicate how you should dress when going to the restaurant, etc., but the guy just keep saying, "I don't care, I have a lot of money, so no matter how expensive a restaurant is, I can afford it."
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