And by the time of the Iraq invasion, Saddam had been weakened by years of sanctions and a virtual air war over his territory. When we invaded, he had no long range weapons to hurl around the ME.
Not so Iran today, which has I think 100s of mobile SCUD launchers, which it will for sure send against Saudi oil infrastructure targets the day we attack.
"And by the time of the Iraq invasion, Saddam had been weakened by years of sanctions and a virtual air war over his territory. "
Again, my example was 1990 air war. In particular, the spectacular first night of the war, which took out a large number of targets. There was no sanctions prior to that. We took out a large number of enemy targets and had very few (if any) losses on that night. Considering that there was zero strategic surprise, this was quite an accomplishment.
Our air assets, from UAVs up to JDAMs, are far more exact, precise and powerful than in 1990.
An Iranian strike could and would look a lot like that - 12 hours of concentrated strikes, over 1000 sorties against a large number of targets.
We have the air power, that's not the problem. We even have the bunker busters to take out underground facitilies. The bottleneck will be getting the intelligence to know where to strike so we are 100% successful.
JMHO.