3. Lave it to Bibi
As noted still within the military options the airstrike has a variation when not the US does it, but a proxy: Israel.
It is a recurring theme at almost every policy that if it doesn't work, or not work fast enough, Israel's palm can start to itch, and make a strike against Iran. As one point the authors put it, there are three clocks ticking:
- Israel's the fastest, they want to shut down Iran's nuclear program ASAP;
- Iran's the slowest, they want to gain time to build that weapon, they will stall and delay;
- US's clock in the middle, they have to find a way to slow down Israel and prevent them mucking up the whole thing, and hasten Iran to do what's told.
So it could happen that this "policy" won't be deployed by the United States, but Israel decides unilaterally to go ahead, and then the US have to react. As they put it:
under the right (or wrong) set of circumstances, Israel would launch an attack—principally airstrikes, but possibly backed by special forces operations — to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
So the US has decisions to make: green light, yellow light, red light, or no light the attack. These are the combinations of encouragement/discouragement and opening Iraqi and Jordanian airspace. Mostly doesn't matter, unless the US sends her own aircrafts to clash with the IAF the whole world would think the US encouraged and helped Israel to do the strikes, consequences remained the same anyway. So the only option is green lighting it, at least that would give the sense of control...
Btw the hope is that both blame and retaliation would be put on Israel, as the authors noted, slim chance.