We can't bomb our way out of the mess we bombed our way into.

Carpet bombing wouldn't work. Neither would taking out water and power infrastructure as JumpCrisscross suggested elsewhere. I think it should be very clear to everyone watching that the Iranian regime has been preparing for this a long time. And they're OK with this being a war of attrition. To quote the regime's missives, "you will drown in our blood."

To quote, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/10/the-fourth-succ...

    > “Mosaic defence” is an Iranian military concept most closely associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), particularly under former commander Mohammad Ali Jafari, who led the force from 2007 to 2019.
    > 
    > The idea is to organise the state’s defensive structure into multiple regional and semi-independent layers instead of concentrating power in a single command chain that could be paralysed by a decapitation strike.
    > 
    > Under this model, the IRGC, the Basij, regular army units, missile forces, naval assets and local command structures form parts of a distributed system. If one part is hit, others keep functioning. If senior leaders are killed, the chain does not collapse. If communications are severed, local units still retain the authority and capacity to act.

Topographically, Iran is mostly mountains with a little bit of flat land. Those mountains are most likely riddled with tunnels that have food, water, drones and missiles. If the US wants to re-open that strait, soldiers would have to fight tunnel by tunnel, inch by inch over a region designed for ambushes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Iran#/media/File:...

They've been smuggling in tunnel boring machines over the decades with a little help from North Korea and China, https://jamesmarinero.substack.com/p/irans-underground-missi... and have dug miles of tunnel everywhere, including the city, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202603091729

The US can and will win at the end, but like the Iranians said themselves, their goal isn't to win; it's to outlast us. They're willing and capable of fighting to the last person. The US and the global economy on the other hand, isn't. Because there isn't an end to fight for.

None of this was (apparently) necessary.

I was amazed to hear this, but apparently, Iranian diplomats handed an American delegation at Geneva a compromise on the nuclear issue that would re-instate the JCPOA. The negotiators didn't understand what they'd been handed over, https://youtu.be/G3uGYpPJEGM?t=265

And so they proceeded to bomb Iran.

The Iranians offered a compromise, it was rejected by people who didn't understand it, and then they broke diplomatic good faith.

Why the US Navy Won't Blast the Iranians and 'Open' Strait of Hormuz