RIP THE BANDAR OFF.

You'd expect to find Iran hawks such as Kevin McCullough writing for Town Hall.

The easiest decision any president can make is the one he never has to make.

Hold another meeting. Send another envoy. Extend another deadline. Issue another carefully worded statement expressing “grave concern.” Washington has turned delay into a governing philosophy, and nowhere has that habit been more dangerous than with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Forty-seven years after the ayatollahs seized power, we’re still hearing the same promise: Just give diplomacy a little more time.

President Donald Trump appears to have answered that question. Reports indicate he has approved plans to strike Iran’s deeply buried Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility should Tehran continue refusing to abandon its march toward a nuclear weapon.

Process, nuance, failure.  Now that the World Cup has wrapped up and the teams and spectators are heading home, perhaps it is time to open up a can on the mullahs.

National Review's Noah Rothman is perhaps the most hawkish contributor on their roster.  "The president should spare the country another protracted humiliation in Iran and rip the Band-Aid off now."

Now might be the time for the thing to be pressed.

Iran’s reluctance to deploy all the means at its disposal is a telling development. It would be a mistake to conclude that the regime’s remnants are of one mind on how to confront the U.S. It’s obvious, for example, that the regime did not intend to force Trump to withdraw the waivers that allowed Iran to sell its oil and petroleum derivatives on the open market for U.S. dollars. Its farcical attempt to blame its attacks on commercial ships on rogue elements within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, for example, is indicative of that.

Moreover, a full appraisal of the damage the regime absorbed during the high-tempo combat phase of this war might have clarified the thinking in Tehran. “Iran’s economy is severely weakened; its nuclear facilities are buried under rubble, and its top nuclear scientists are dead; its leadership appears divided over whether to do a deal with the United States,” read Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’s summary of Iran’s predicament.

And, from the Iranian perspective, there’s little light at the end of this tunnel. The resumption of the blockade in concert with the Treasury Department’s victorious prosecution of primary and secondary violations of the sanctions throttling the Iranian economy will continue to limit Iran’s freedom of action. Meanwhile, air strikes on Iran’s air defense, radar systems, fast boats, anti-ship missiles, and drone launch sites will gradually strip Iran of the tools it uses to hold the global economy hostage.

And yet, if Iran is pulling its punches, so, too, is the United States. While the U.S. has attacked some Iranian targets deep within the interior of the Islamic Republic, most of its strikes have been limited to the Strait of Hormuz and the surrounding coastline. That reflects the campaign’s limited objectives as well as the president’s efforts to use force as a signaling mechanism — negotiations by other means.

It might be that Iran's capabilities are not what they were even a year ago.  Victor Hanson notes that for all the volleying, even the independent elements of the revolutionary guards aren't flipping explosives at Israel.

Whatever the final denouement with Iran, Tehran has lost a half-century and half-trillion-dollar investment in its military and nuclear industrial complex. The once-feared bully of the Muslim Middle East has been humiliated and exposed as a paper tiger, with its economy, and perhaps its very existence, now dependent on the disposition of the Trump administration. In its sporadic missile launches, Iran often leaves Israel alone because it knows the Jewish state can target any of its unhinged leaders whenever hostilities resume.

In a development that would once have seemed surreal, Israel is providing intelligence and missile defense to the Muslim Gulf states, which are effectively fighting alongside the United States and Israel against a fellow Muslim nation.

That might be prudence, a conjecture reinforced by the absence of noise about the legitimate government of Lebanon, such as it is, working with Israel to defang Hezbollah.  Or perhaps what remains of Iranian military capability is focusing more on United States facilities, playing to popular opinion in the States.

That's where Mr Rothman wants Our President to leave the posturing to the mullahs, and finish the job.

The president wants the world to know that he is prepared to execute a “massive offensive” against Iran in the coming days. “We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges,” the president warned — a threat he’s issued many times before but never executed. “I’ll save the energy targets for last, but ultimately we’ll hit energy targets,” Trump explained. “I don’t want to negotiate now,” Trump said, even as he stressed that U.S. strikes would get worse “unless they get to the table and negotiate.”

If the time for talk was over, Trump would be doing a lot less talking.

For three months, the president has done everything in his power to avoid a return to major combat operations against Iran. Perhaps inadvertently, Trump has now stumbled into a combination of tactics — the blockade, the sanctions, the selective strikes, and the prospect of tangible, irreplaceably vital rewards for the regime’s more cooperative elements — that could, with time, prove coercive. But we now have ample evidence to conclude that Trump does not have the patience for that.

On the other hand, isolating Teheran and the interior cities from food and fuel might better be achieved by creating a coastal railway desert.

For six straight nights, the US had bombed southern cities, cranking up the pressure on Iran to relinquish control of the Strait of Hormuz.

But now the US military was going for the transport arteries connecting key southern ports to the rest of the country.

The bombings leave Bandar Abbas, a city of 500,000 people where roughly half the country's trade comes ashore, almost completely isolated.

By Friday morning, the roads linking the city and its people to the rest of the nation lay broken, the railway severed, and a port that helps feed some 90 million people all but cut off from the country it sustains.

Bandar Abbas is also home to Iran's main naval base, which is critical to the regime's ability to control the Strait of Hormuz.

Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official, said the Trump administration was becoming increasingly convinced that cutting off the port city was the key to reopening the vital sea passage.

"There's a growing sense, a growing conclusion inside the Pentagon, that whether the United States wants to do this or not, they really have no choice if they want this to end," he said.

Bandar Abbas is the city that keeps Iran alive.

Its Shahid Rajaee port is the country's "golden gateway", handling close to half of all Iranian trade, including industrial machinery, construction materials, agricultural supplies, and consumer goods that stock the markets and feed the factories, along with steel, fertilisers, and petroleum products that move across its docks.

The bombs fell along the corridors running west and north of the city.

Local authorities said the Gariveh bridge, on the Bandar Abbas–Khamir–Lar route, was among five damaged overnight, along with a bridge past Latidan village, two on the Kahorestan route towards Lar, a half-finished bridge on the Bandar Khamir–Keshar road, and the crossing at Maro village in Khamir district.

Will that work continue?  As we prepare to publish the post, the strikes go on.

Iran can make it stop at any time by. . . stopping. But the catch is, they really have to stop it, no more head fakes, ruses, jukes, dodges, and ploys. Just stop it.

Don’t doubt that they will have to stop it. We are going to make them stop.

That's the official line from Central Command tonight. We'll see what tomorrow brings.