[csb6]

Attacking Iran has made the entire region less safe and so far there is no evidence Iran has been deterred. They continue to successfully hit targets with missiles and drones, and they have expanded operations to successfully close the Strait of Hormuz. Seems like it would have been a lot cheaper to not attack Iran and instead to rein in Israel, an existing nuclear power that is the primary destabilizing force in the Middle East.

[DoctorOetker]

Both Israel's as well as Iran's and for that matter all nuclear ambitions of any nation should be reigned in, as humanity was doing for a while after the first cold war, with the progressive reduction treaties etc. From the perspective of the USA, a medium-future nuclear attack by Israel was much less likely than a medium-future nuclear attack by Iran.

Closing the Strait of Hormuz is quite easy, scorched-earth-tactics (well scorched-sea-tactics) like sea-mines are a lot easier than conquering territory.

Just look Bosnia&Herzegovina and the huge minefields that were deposited there.

This doesn't show Iran's resilience, and sea mines can be cleared.

There's a long list of cards the USA holds and somewhere down that line there are options like announcing total destruction of neighborhoods of Teheran, and advising the inhabitants to leave, starting with the richest (and thus regime aligned) neighborhoods. Just gradually announce the carpet bombing neighborhoods and provide ample time for evacuation. Watch your demands being met one by one: defuse your sea mines, if one more goes off thats another richest neighborhood gone, give up your for-energy-generation-over-enriched uranium (there is no discussion of its existence as Iran was pleading an insignificant dilution of part of this stockpile) or that another richest-neighborhood-thats-left gone.

Unlike the human-shields / hostage-taking tactics of the IRGC / ayatollah, it would target not innocent third parties nor the lives but the possessions of the regime-aligned parts of the population.

All the people you forced to study physics for the megalomaniac dreams of the regime? Allow them to flee the country (and take their inkling nuclear skills with them) and welcome them with a new free life. In the west we don't gas your girlfriends, sisters, nieces over a few hairs sticking out from under their headwear.

People repeat the patterns of their breaktrhoughs / successes.

There were many factions around the time the current regime rose to power.

Which one won? Which one was reluctantly given bargaining power by the free world? The faction that took hostages.

Ever since, whenever the regime felt threatened (internally or externally) they resort to hostage taking and human shields.

No sane person puts a girls school in a semi-used military complex, especially not in that hotbed of the middle east, with Iraq as a neighbour, Israel not much further, and while sponsoring and weaponizing groups like Hamas.

[watwut]

This was not about "nuclear ambitions" and we all know it. This has squat zero with nuclear threat, existing or even imagined.

[csb6]

Destroy civilian areas neighborhood by neighborhood until they comply? That's not only a war crime - that would create an international humanitarian crisis and millions of refugees. Tehran alone is a city of more than 9 million people. The IRGC doesn't care how many civilians the U.S. kills. It only strengthens their case that the war is existential and America/Israel want to obliterate Iran. They have a huge stockpile of missiles and drones that are not easily destroyed. Mines are not needed to close the strait, just the credible threat of drone and missile strikes, and no ship will sail through.

"Regime-aligned civilians" is a slippery slope that is essentially collective punishment. Most anyone in Iran can be tied to the government through jobs or family, and they are not segregated by level of "regime alignment", so you would be obliterating the homes of many civilians who might otherwise oppose the government.

Genuinely flabbergasted that you came up with that strategy unprompted when not even Hegseth ("drink blood from the skulls of our enemies") has suggested it AFAIK. Your post genuinely reads like the monologue of a cartoonish villain.

[Hikikomori]

Why did Trump cancel the Iran deal then? US intelligence agencies all agreed they were not working towards a bomb anymore.

And even Israel puts military targets next to civilians.

Just embarrassing levels of hasbara.