Air Power can pass the resolution ball to diplomats to arrange for a cease fire, but as we see today, that creates not an end to the conflict, merely a ''timeout'' with more to come.
As miserably incompetent as Rumsfeld is, even he cannot ignore that fact that his briefers will tell him about the Persian landmass being the worse possible geography for a land maneuver force operations and---having never been successfully defeated or occupied in almost the past 2,000 years. The only regions where massed armies would be able to efficciently operate (even if we had a large enough army remaining after our current FUBAR--which, of course, we don't) is the vast high plains of the far north bordering Russia or one of its seceded new nations and the narrow littoral along th gulf. The centers of power, government, industrial, economic, demographic and armed strength sits smack-dab in the geographic areas essentially incapable of successful access to massed maneuver armies. Thus, air power can really screw with the infrastructure, transportation facilities and those things that affect the population, but it can't get them to run up the white flag or silence their fight-to-the-last-martyr rhetoric.
Don't expect a spontaneous civil uprising, revolt or coup. War making governments often rationalize and predict that, as Rumsfeld said: ''...the civilian population will greet us as liberators.'' Except in conquered nations like those Eurpoean countries taken by Hitler's force in WW II, that is a much wished for but irrational wet dream. It's much more likely, and usually the case, that the civilian population is enraged and will indeed fight to the last old man, housewife and teenage kid; ie: Great Britain in response to German bombing of cities.
I propose a new more open ended type of war, as follows. Take the best known positions of Iran and Syrias leaders and bomb them once a week until submission. Make a strong intelligence effort to locate the most likely locations of the leaders each week and bomb. No ground forces, few civilian deaths. Just a statement that it will continue until Iran stops halts hezbollah and palestenian terrorist sponsorship and enrichment activities verifibly and we will stop. No other stipulations will be considered.
In a classic warfare scenario aerial bombardment softens targets. In this environment, employing airpower may harden some targets. That said insurgents haven't rendered war tech obsolete... on the contrary, modern war machines evolved to fight the enemy’s modern war machines. Most people don't realize that In the GWOT Americans are just as capable of fighting asymmetric warfare as any of our enemies. The fact is we've come to rely on tech, as our Cold War adversaries relied on tech. I believe we have to raise an ideological army to win – the prophets of liberty. Sure, we need boots on the ground… we have to have our ideas on the ground to win. This is a war of ideas isn’t it?