Conquering Through The Air
I am probably more knowledgeable about 20th century military conflicts than most, so perhaps it is useful to remind everyone of this -- I can think of no country in history that ever capitulated or initiated a favorable regime change in response to air attacks alone. The closest I can think of is the Netherlands that surrendered to Hitler in 1940 after the brutal bombing of Rotterdam, but this capitulation occurred when Germany had an overwhelming force of infantry and armor slicing through that nation. You can soften them up through the air, but you win on the ground. Neither the UK, Germany, the USSR, Poland or later North Korea or North Vietnam ever gave up after an air campaign (the latter an example of where the US attempted to bomb a country into the stone age that started the war in the stone age).
All this of course is to reiterate my skepticism that bombing the sh*t out of Iran is going to lead to any sort of surrender or favorable regime change. I see of late that Trump supporters have adopted the defense that their purpose in Iran is to degrade Iran's military ability and ability to support terrorism and conflicts in the region. But that sure as hell was not the Administration's public line at the beginning of the war. My recollection was that Trump's reasoning was we were going to decapitate the leadership and the people would rise up in revolution, an outcome I found unlikely from the first day.
Postscript: I would have thought it a perfectly defensible position in a war like this to argue against the efficacy of our attacks while still believing the target regime is awful. Apparently that seems to be a bridge too far for most war opponents, as I increasingly see those on the anti-war side attempting to portray the Iranian government as morally superior to the US. For all our flaws and our failure to live up to our own standards, that is frankly absurd. But I still see it every day, women in the US running around protesting conditions for women in the US wearing Handmaid's Tale outfits while simultaneously defending the ethics of the Iranian (or Gaza) governments.
So I will add my usual postscript: I put all of the above in the "I wish I were wrong" category. Opponents of wars frequently fall into the trap of supporting the other side. The Iranian government is one of the worst in the world, both in how it treats its people (or at least the half without a Y chromosome) and its proclivity for inciting violence and mayhem in other countries. It is a totalitarian regime responsible for much of the current instability in the Middle East and I would love to wave my magic wand and see it gone.
There is no way to bring down the Iranian regime through a bombing campaign. The regime still exists, after we've supposedly bombed over 10,000 targets. The people killed will be replaced by other people chosen by the same regime that chose the last ones. If anything, the new crew will be less cooperative than their predecessors.
The Iranian regime now has the initiative. They've absorbed the worst we can do to them, and they've shown their ability to strike their neighbors, and to threaten most of the world by closing the straits of Hormuz. We can bomb all their drone bases, rocket launchers, and speed boats, and they'll still have the capability to close the straits of Hormuz next week after they've gotten more drones and rockets. They can further escalate by attacking more fixed facilities neighboring states, further reducing oil supply and raising oil prices.
It seems to me that degrading Iran's military capability was a low priority objective, because Iran has barely used its conventional military capability since the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Setting back their nuclear program could be achieved, but we can never know how effective the bombing was, and whether the Iranians are now 3 weeks, 3 months, or 3 years from building a bomb. But we can be sure that they have much more reason now to develop a bomb than they had a year ago.
The Iranian regime is bad in nearly every way. As Warren noted, they are terribly oppressive of their own people. They support the worst regional terrorists. They've sponsored attacks against civilians around the world. If we could end the regime through bombing, I'd be in favor. But we can't end the regime, we can't end their nuclear program, we can't end their missile program, and we can't do much to advance any other conceivable objective. Whether the bombing ends tomorrow or five years from now, the regime will still exist, and we'll have to deal with it in some way. We'd be best off cutting our losses and finding an acceptable ending.