Oh?
Iran's population of 82 million means that it can draw on a deep well of manpower. This is a key factor in sustaining long wars of attrition such as the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.
The article cites Global Firepower Index to rank Iran as the 13th most powerful nation. I'm not sure what to make of GFI. Whenever I've seen something specific I scratch my head in puzzlement. But I've never actually really explored the methodology of the site.
Anyway, the idea that Iran's population makes them able to wage a war of attrition is misleading. Sure, you can't lose people you don't have. We're in "duh" territory here. But in the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranians had three times the population of Iraq and suffered "only" twice the casualties of Iraq. That should mean Iran won, right?
Well, not on the battlefields. Iran is the side that broke in the war, with the January 1987 Iranian offensive called Karbala Five signaling that defeat:
Perhaps 20,000 Iranians died in the battle. Iraq's casualties were about half of Iran's. Iraq's performance is notable in that Iraq withstood and won the kind of brutal bloodletting that supposedly only Iran could endure. Observers at the time saw only that Iran had launched yet another in a seemingly endless series of big offensives. They speculated about how many more of these attacks Iraq could endure. Actually, Iran broke at Karbala Five. It would be many months before observers began to wonder what was wrong with Iran when no further attacks were begun, yet it was true that the "Islamic Revolution bled to death in Karbala V."
Clearly, having a lot of people and having a lot more than your enemy isn't a guarantee that your people will suffer whatever it takes to win.
And of course, even if a country is willing to lose massive numbers of people in one war doesn't mean that they will always be willing to lose troops in another war.
