Wait, I’m confused

So, we’re not supposed to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities because this will cause the Iranian people — who, I am routinely told, are remarkably pro-western and anti-mullah — to unite against the imperialist west, doing much to damage the goodwill we’ve built up with them. (Or something.) All right, I kind of get that calculus.

What confuses me is when the same people call for crippling economic sanctions against the Iranian regime, applauding Obama for using appeasement on the missile shield diplomacy to try and convince the Russians to help us out at the Security Council. Now, I’m not a fancy big city politician, but it seems to me that imposing sanctions that will make the life of every single average Iranian far, far worse while doing little to disrupt the ruling class’s standard of living (the effect that sanctions always, always have) will have the exact same effect as bombing the nuclear sites, won’t it? It will cause the average man on the street to hate us, won’t it?

Well, it won’t have the exact same effect. We won’t destroy the regime’s centrifuges. So we’ll have a nutso ruling class led by a Holocaust denier who wants to see our only ally in the region wiped from the map, a people who are radically pissed off because we’ve decimated their standard of living through sanctions, and they’ll have a nuclear weapon.

What am I missing?