Is the Bush administration being more pragmatic than it pretends on Iran?

Gareth Porter argues that the recent threats of military action against Iran, particularly those stemming from news reports about the US notifying Turkey and other NATO countries about preparations for an early strike on Iran, are essentially bluffs: US Tries to Pressure Iran with Attack Stories Inter Press Service 01/25/06.

He also reminds us that both the outgoing Social Democratic/Green administration in Germany and the incoming Grand Coalition headed by Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats opposed the Bush administration's open military threats against Iran:

Porter writes that after an August 2005 press conference in which Bush talked about "all options" being open against Iran:

It took Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder only a few hours to respond to Bush's move to put the military option ostentatiously on the table by declaring that the alliance should "take the military option off the table".

In September, however, Schroeder's Social Democrats were defeated by the opposition Christian Democrats, as the administration had hoped, and by early October Angela Merkel was on her way to forming a new government. Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns was then dispatched to meet with representatives of Britain, France and Germany to "begin discussing ways to ratchet up the pressure on Tehran", according to a report by the Wall Street Journal's Carla Anne Robbins on Oct. 6.

Burns' top priority was certainly to get the European allies to integrate the idea that the military option is "on the table" into its negotiating stance on Iran's nuclear policy. Subsequently, Britain's Tony Blair began to echo Bush's position on the military option, presumably at U.S. insistence, but Merkel and French President Jacques Chirac avoided any endorsement of that posture.

Having failed to get agreement by the European three to exploit the military option in the diplomatic maneuvering with Iran, the Bush administration apparently felt that it needed to take other steps to increase the pressure on Tehran, including arranging for sensational newspaper articles to appear in the Turkish and German press. (my emphasis)

Porter argues that the Bush administration is likely to realize that not only and invasion of Iran but a massive aerial campaign are not practical options.  He points to many indications that the administration intends to rely on targeted commando operations to sabotage Iranian nuclear facilities rather than a larger-scale assault.  Porter writes:

Jushua Kurlantzick of The New Republic wrote in Gentleman's Quarterly last May that top officials had adopted a new strategy of "deterrence and disruption" toward Iran in the fall of 2004 that was aimed ultimately at covert operations by special forces to damage nuclear sites, according to a government official.

Kurlantzick's source confirmed, in effect, an earlier report by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker that the administration had approved conducting covert probes by reconnaissance missions in Iran to identify potential nuclear sites as targets for later military strikes. But it suggested any such strikes would be by commando teams rather than from the air.

"You'll start seeing reports of an 'accidental gas leak' at Natanz [an Iranian nuclear facility]," the official was quoted as saying.

The Republicans seem to have endless faith in these sorts of operations.  But the actual record of such clandestine sabotage operations doesn't seem to justify their optimism.