“These [Iranian] difficulties slow the timeline, of course,” said Yaalon, a former Israeli defense chief. And last Thursday, outgoing Mossad chief Meir Dagan told Israeli reporters that Iran couldn’t build a bomb before 2015 at the earliest, in part because of unspecified “measures that have been deployed against them.”

A senior Obama administration official gave me a similar account of Iran’s troubles. “They’re not moving as fast as we had feared a year ago,” he said…

What’s increasingly clear is that low-key weapons – covert sabotage and economic sanctions – are accomplishing many of the benefits of military action, without the costs. It’s a devious approach – all the more so because it’s accompanied by near-constant U.S. proposals of diplomatic dialogue – but in that sense, it matches Iran’s own operating style of pursuing multiple options at once.