A report in a French newspaper says Israel will soon be deploying covert strike teams into Iran to blow stuff up and assassinate key people in the nuclear program - who knows if this is true but I realized I should have thought of this before - all the talk and gestures aimed at keeping the threat of an air strike alive could really have been about hiding the true tactic of using special forces on the ground. Air strikes were an iffy proposition no matter how you looked at it and best case scenarios guessed at most Israel delays Iran's plans by a few years - it could be Israel has decided that covert operations can do just as well as that but with the added advantage of limiting the ways Iran can retaliate - they obviously could still launch missiles in response but such an indiscriminate act would be more difficult to justify given the discrete nature of Israel's aggression thus possibly limiting Iran to employing its terrorist proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, to exact revenge - which would be bad, sure, but still, a threat Israel understands and has acquired significant expertise in defending against.
On the surface, this kind of makes sense - allowing for the fact that I have no realistic idea of just how much havoc Israeli special forces can unleash. I would imagine that to be successful some, possibly many operatives would already have to have infiltrated Iran.
