That’s the recommendation of Michael O’Hanlon, Research Director of the Foreign Policy Program of Left-leaning Brookings Institution. His rationalizations include these:
[A]s Iranian oil inventories on ships around the world diminish, overland supply routes are pressured, and other sources of Iranian regime income are gradually curtailed, it is increasingly likely that time is on our side in the economic dimension of the war, even if the global pain from the conflict is significant. … Iranian leaders aren’t like the Taliban; they like money, pomp, and power. Today they are hurting.
Lacking money, pomp, and power though doesn’t mean the Iranian terrorists are hurting. To conclude that assumes—naively or cynically; you decide—that their pain points in any way resemble ours. And there’s that global pain that the rest of the globe feels: we’re supposed to be as indifferent to that as the terrorists are to their own?
[A] major bombing campaign would run a near-certain risk of intensified Iranian retaliation, in the region and beyond, further depleting US missile defense interceptor inventories while running the risk of much higher fuel prices and higher casualties, perhaps even on the home front.
This emphasizes an essential contradiction in O’Hanlon’s argument, which he exposed earlier in his article, apparently obliviously.
[M]ore than 30,000 additional US combat sorties, including strike missions attacking some 13,000 aim points, have been less effective against other targets. Perhaps one-third to two-thirds of Iran’s missile force was put out of action, yet some has likely been rebuilt. Drone production continues apace, even as US regional allies remain vulnerable to Iranian attack.
Despite our Navy is largely successful efforts in escorting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s terrorists continue to attack that shipping, with enough success to keep maritime insurance costs at several times their levels a year ago and so still sharply elevates the price of oil, even though “limited” to those higher prices. Moreover, Iran still lobs missiles across the Arabian Gulf at Arab nations’ energy production and transportation infrastructures while continuing to arm the Houthis and its Iraqi militias so they can join in the infrastructure attacks.
Steady certainly could be useful, especially if it’s steady total conflict—kinetic, cyber, economic. Slow, though, is maliciously foolish and punishes, only and severely, the Iranian people, who are not the bad guys here. The bad guys—the terrorists—are the IRGC and its civilian political arm who are in charge of the government that’s reigning over the Iranian people.
Slow has, and will have, no effect on those terrorists: they’re too married to their ideology and too indifferent of the effects of their ideology on the people over whom they rule. More broadly than that, those terrorists’ value set, concept of morality, means of getting others to live by their imperatives, and view of the costs of these to others are so radically different from our own, from those of western civilization, as to be orthogonal to them.
The only way to defeat Iran consists of two steps. First is to distinguish between the Iranian government and the Iranian people. That distinction is largely in place. Second is to mount that total war and keep it going at maximum pace until the terrorists are dead. Part of their value set: if they’re still alive, they’re winning, no matter how many others suffer catastrophically or are killed. It’s that latter cost, those others’, that is maximized by fits and starts conflict and by “slow,” regardless of how steady.
