While many in the US on the Right are sneering at giving Iran 5 days of warnings before bombing at least 85 proxies of Iran in Syria and Iraq, and promising days more of it to come, this is the best course to prevent open war with Iran. But it won’t work. It only buys more time.
A lot of people want Iran to be directly bombed in response to the deaths of three US servicemen in Jordan caused by an Iranian-proxy missile attack. By launching large scale attacks on their proxies instead, this gives Iran fair warning of what will come next if they don’t back off. With any other country this would work.
Half of the problem is that if we engage Iran directly in war, then all their proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon will immediately enter into it, full on, and drag the entire Middle East into war.
The other half of the problem is that this is exactly what Iran wants, and they’re going to keep provoking the US to attack them, or else they’ll grow impatient and attack us directly first from Iran. Either way, the current US response is just a stop-gap, a delaying tactic before we and Iran are openly at war and the Middle East becomes a churning bloodbath.
For religious reasons it’s important to the Iranian leadership that Iran be attacked first before going to war, even though they’re the ones instigating the war. So they create proxy armies in other nations and get them to attack Iran’s enemies, to force their enemies to attack them, so they can be justified in going to war. Yes, they’re insane, but that’s Islam.