“… Some American military planners derided Barak’s tactic as ‘mowing the grass’ — a small-bore effort that would need to be repeated again and again — but it might have been more like a way to get the United States to move first. ‘Barak would tell us, “We can’t do what you do, so we need to do it sooner,”‘ says Dennis Ross, who handled Iran policy at the National Security Council during Obama’s first term. ‘We interpreted that as designed to put pressure on us…'”

“‘It did not escape our understanding that having a visit of a senior American official on the calendar probably bought you a couple of weeks — before the visit and then after the visit,’ [Dan] Shapiro says. ‘For an Israeli official, it meant you knew you could not strike without feeling that you’ve deceived somebody while they were sitting in your office…'”

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