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Knowing the specific population of Iran is far, far less relevant than knowing it’s a Shia theocracy implacably opposed to Israël and pushing Shiite interests in the Middle East. Getting Iran’s population right is kinda trivia.
And Ted Cruz believing the mandate to support Israël is much more popular than you give him credit for. The specific formulation may not be, but ‘God will punish the enemies of Israel’ is both widely believed among the base and a reasonable interpretation of recent events.
TIL that Israel does Metal umlauts.
It’s technically a diaresis.
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Why not both? Is that really so much to ask?
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Yeah, the specific population. I wouldn't care if he was off by 10 million in either direction, but knowing the ballpark is pretty important. I didn't know it's population either (like at all), and finding out we're talking about a country the size of a fifth of the entire EU spooked me out quite a bit.
Like seemingly a lot of people, my initial guess was 80 mil.
The thought process was something like this, though less articulate. (Coming up with that number took me less time than it will take you to read this, and much less than it's going to take me to write it.)
"I know it's big. Like I'm positive it's over 50 mil. On the other hand, if it was US tier, much less China/India tier, I'm pretty sure I would know that. I wouldn't be completely shocked to learn it was over 100, if it wasn't by too much, but if you made me choose I'd bet against it. But probably closer to 100 than 50... 80 seems in the right ballpark? Maybe 85? More likely 85 than 75, but probably around there somewhere."
I don't quite count that as a win, but I guess I could have done a lot worse.
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I would’ve guessed 80 million, but let’s be real- it doesn’t matter that much. Ted Cruz knows Iran is big enough to be relevant. That’s what he needs to know.
I would have guessed it's another Iraq, but it's two of them.
Like I said in the other comment, I actually ended up liking Cruz after listening to it, so don't want to give him too much shit over pedantic stuff like specific population statistics, but I would like to hear some kind of a plan on how to handle the toppling of 2xIraq, if this is indeed what they're going to do.
Iraq's population has nearly doubled since 2000, like Afghanistan and Gaza. So Iran is actually 4 2003 Iraqs.
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another way of looking at it is that it's roughly the size of Iraq and Afghanistan, combined, and even larger than that in land area. There's a reason that during the iraq war the US still shied away from invading Iran.
and though Iraq now has a population of ~45m when we invaded in 2003 their population was only 27m, Afghanistan's was 20. So if it's relative to the points of our regime change attempts in those countries Iran has more like 4x the population. The potential refugee wave would be larger than Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
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