It is impossible to affect the Persian empire by such means. They might as well have tried to take the Soviet Union or China by like means. There is no such thing as 'flattening' China or Iran
Look at what 9/11 did - for quite a while after the attack, which was heinous but in the grand scheme of things nothing compared to the scale of destruction that was visited upon Iraq and Afghanistan afterwards; And at least for a few years, very many Americans were in favour of those conflicts.