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Are you sure the US could achieve ultimate victory over Iran and rule it for 100 years? I'm not convinced. Even after removing all rules of engagement, glassing half their cities and sweeping every single mountain valley 10 times, it still would just be insurrection after insurrection.
I'm actually having a hard time thinking of a single combination of society and geography more capable of resisting foreign rule.
The... province would certainly have close to zero economic output. The infrastructure necessary for any sort of economy would be to easily destroyed by insurgents. So what's even left of the idea? Trading army brigades for a thin justification of genocide?
It has to be on the scale of de-nazification but I think it's doable. Complete disarmament of the populace. Choosing new winners. If people want to go and hide in the mountains/foreign countries you can keep them there with drones/border control. Levels of security need to match levels of resistance, but once everyone is more prosperous than before and the most resistant have been dealt with it should be pretty stable.
People respect power and competence including everyday Arabs. Yes, done poorly it will be a shit show (and shouldn't be done at all), but for a competent regime with modern tech it shouldn't be hard.
But you do have to classify them as an enemy nation which, if they got a nuclear weapon, would use it against you or allies, in order to justify the de-nazification treatment. And I do think you would need direct foreign rule for decades to ward off insurrection because they are a more foreign culture than Germans.
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The US could easily beat Iran and rule it as long as we wanted, in military terms. In political terms, it's entirely impossible to do with a "democracy" of oligarchs who will change policies at the drop of a hat if the media whines a little.
How do you imagine the country to look like under US rule?
How do you "easily" stop the IRGC (and its successor insurgency groups) from perpetually setting the oil fields on fire, blowing up the pipelines, attacking every single supply route you run through the mountains, firing MANPADS at every single helicopter and airlifter that dips below 15k feet and generally IED-bombing, droning, mortar-ing and rocketing every US installation in the country? How do you stop them from infesting every town you turn your back on for five minutes?
Is it just a million miles of barbed wire fences with autonomous auto-cannon turrets? Because you certainly can't just kill them all. Trying that always results in recruitment automatically out-pacing your kill rate, and Iran has a - for all intends and purposes - infinite recruitment base.
I don't think it's that hard to imagine- we can just look back to what Iran looked like in the 60s and 70s under the US-backed Shah. Some political repression and violence, but also a lot of peace and prosperity. I expect we'll also see this in Venezuela.
More generally, the kind of violence you're describing- massive use of MANPADS and sophisticated explosives- doesn't just magically happen. It happens when some other country with sophisticated weapons factories is sending them weapons. Normal people on the street don't have the capability to blow up an oil refinery or shoot down an airplane. And for a long time now, the country that's been supplying most of those sophisticated weapons to insurgents was... Iran.
Wait, wait, your scheme hinges on Iranian royalists/secularists/liberals fighting your (ground) battles? Ramming through regime change from the air, once again going out to win hearts and minds (successfully this time, for real!), and then having them do the dying? Watch from afar while they de-islamize every single institution and hunt down the mullahs? I'm very skeptical. They don't have history, especially recent history, on their side. And neither the training, the cohesion, nor the morale.
Frankly, the IRGC is going to eat them alive.
Well, if the IRGC doesn't have absolutely enormous stashes of at least small arms (and probably even drone/rocket parts plus warheads) in the mountains, they didn't plan even a week ahead. I'd be very surprised. Also, I'd expect Russian surplus equipment and Chinese dual use goods to make it across the border. But for any of that to even matter, they'd first have to lose the cities, which would be orders of magnitude more bloody than Mosul or Falludscha.
You asked "how do you imagine it would look like under US rule" and I gave you an example. Is it your opinion that everyone in Iran- the entire population! is a fanatic who will happily die for their Islamic theocracty? Because so far that does not seem to be the case, at all.
The bailey: "the IRGC will endlessly destroy all equipment and aircraft with their infinite stocks of missiles" The motte: "They must have some small arms still buried in the mountains somewhere..."
Well, I suppose they might actually try to fight in a motte-and-bailey style, but I don't think it's going to devastate the US military like you're imagining. They seem to have mostly stopped their missile attacks already.
Which border? Neither of those countries shares a border with Iran. Is China going to be sending convoys of missiles all the way across Afghanistan, do you think? Is Russia going to stop their war in Ukraine to focus on sending cargo ships across the Caspian Sea?
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Iran has a very low tfr compared to Afghanistan or even Iraq at the time of the US invasion. Broadly I agree with you but the incoming supply of young men is proportionately lower.
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