"Our ground forces are stretched too thin as it is and they cannot stop a mass Iranian evacuation to Iraq that would cause complete havoc in Iraq. Iran must collapse from the inside."
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
The forces we have in Iraq would stop the Iranian Army dead were it to try to invade Iraq.
Perhaps you mean that an American military attack on Iran would cause Iranian civilians to flee en masse for the Iraqi desert.
Why?
The US isn't going to be destroying Iranian cities, but military sites. There isn't the ethnic and religious diversity in Iran that would cause a government breakdown to provoke an ethnic civil war. Why would Farsi-speaking ethnic Persians flee Persia for a piece of Arabia, in the desert, in a bloody civil war?
It makes no sense.
The Persians will hunker down and stay put even as we gut their government from the air...were we to do that...but we won't.
There is no gas in the tank for that sort of third war.
And the talk about ISRAEL doing it is just fantasy. Israel is too far away and does not have the long range strike forces to be effective at taking down Iran. They could perhaps get a raid or two into Iran, which would only enrage the country ... and enrage Iraq, over which the Israelis would have to fly.
Truth is, we're going to make a lot of noise, and Iran is going to get the atomic bomb, because they're not going to back down, and they know we don't have the gas in the tank to start a war with them. It's finished. We screwed up at the outset of this war, and we can't walk that cat back now.
There are lessons learned here for the next one, but we already are determinedly not learning them.
Yes, I believe that Iranian citizens will flee to the frontier with Iraq as urged by their Government. Our ground troops would be caught between bad guys, one in Iraq and the other civilians urged on by the Iranian military. WE won't kill anymore civilians than we have too and the Iranians know that. So they will send as many as they can to overrun us. Iran has one of the poorest populations in the ME due to the high military spending and the reduction of oil profits. Many volunteers for cannon fodder - the martyr syndrome. I have also seen stories of "Civil Defense" drills in Iran that seem to evacuate whole cities - bad Americans attacked. This seems to me to be the trigger for panic and chaos. So you have 80% of the ground combat certified US military power caught in Iraq with crappy ROE's and then Lil' Kim will pull some $hit.
If you look at the region prior to Churchill's re-districting the Iranians can make claim to a larger part of what we now call Iraq. Someday they will do that. I also don't believe that any attack on Iran can be limited to "military" targets - there is just too much spread around.