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That strikes me as wishful thinking. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan surrendered, they had to be taken, and each of them took more than 36 hours, as would Iran, due to their geography and population, if nothing else.
I am specifically saying “Not if you do war crimes”. We clearly can’t do regime change etc with just air strikes on military targets. But we do have the ability to bomb basically anything in the country. We can nearly completely cut power/water in Iran.
The regime will shoot protestors to maintain power. If we credibly threatened civilian infrastructure and it became topple the regime or die I think we could succeed.
Saddam Hussein fired chemical weapons directly into Iranian cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people yet the Iranians kept fighting for years in the hope that they could seize some territory in compensation.
It seems pretty doubtful that blowing up some civilian infrastructure would achieve much of anything
Not some civilian infra, it would need to be nearly all of it. Full shutdown of roads, industry, oil, etc. Any building that makes other things. If production is mixed into residential then the residential has to be hit too to hit the production.
This would of course be a genocide but if nobody can move an inch without being cluster bombed with artillery surely Iran would collapse if only to starvation and looting. The strait would probably be open in this case.
Trump hesitates because he fears the inevitable war crimes tribunal this would cause from democrats. He is not confident republicans can hold the executive for the remainder of his lifespan, or that some other republican president would throw him under the bus in an act of bipartisan goodwill.
Why? Has everybody forgotten that partisan / guerrilla warfare exists?
Partisans can exist only within a living civilian population. Guerrillas can't exist for very long without civilian support.
Sure they can. You can stockpile supplies that will last you months, or even years, very easily.
Decentralized cells of IRGC units could certainly survive and threaten the strait. I believe most could be convinced to surrender by remaining IRGC leadership if Tehran and other major cities are flattened by fuel-air bombs, cluster munitions, or whatever the modern equivalent is. Perhaps Trump also shares your doubts about a civilian infra-bombing escalation. To me though, it might be his only way out of the mess.
I want to clarify that I was totally against starting any military conflict with Iran to begin with. However, now that direct hostilities have started, we have to decisively finish any conflict with countries whose official slogan is "Death to America", or we will be leaving yet another problem for future generations to clean up.
You could easily do that. Just withdraw unilaterally. Of course that would require the US to stop being a client state of Israel.
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