Dude, Where's My Drone?

Our babe in the woods president is really playing hardball with the Iranians, who managed to get their grimy mitts on one of our high tech drones.  His statement:

"Let me be clear.  Bla bla bla..."

The Iranian response demonstrates that The Wages of Appeasement is humiliation...

On Tuesday, with Putin-like contempt, Iran demanded that Obama apologize instead. “Obama begs Iran to give him back his toy plane,” reveled the semiofficial Fars News Agency.

How did Iran get our drone?

I don't believe an America-hating mole in the CIA did this, as some of the more conspiratorial-minded have suggested.  It is possible that Iran Hijacked Our Drone, as a chest-thumping Iranian is now claiming.  They are not backwards people and they have help from China and Russia.

Add in our complacency (remember learning that Al Qaeda in Iraq had tapped into our unencrypted Predator drone feeds?), and it is a real possibility.  We are just about stupid enough to fly such advanced technology naked, believing no one is smart enough to take our toys away from us.  I don't know anything about our drone programs, but what the Iranian in the CS Monitor said sounds feasible if the aircraft's networks were not encrypted or if we failed to equip it with safeguards against GPS meaconing.

When will we start punishing complacency and incompetence?

Will anyone in our government or congress investigate this?  Does anyone get fired anymore?  General McChrystal is the only person I can recall getting fired for anything, and that was because he was stupid enough to invite a Rolling Stone reporter in on his staff's bull sessions where they trash talked the president (who the general voted for).

Another Plausible Scenario...

There could be a simpler, low tech answer.  A perfidious Pastun in the Afghan Army or some other group who is ostensibly "on our side" more than likely recovered the craft inside Afghanistan and trucked it over to Iran.

The CIA’s RQ-170 “Sentinel” drone captured by the Iranians last week may have gone down in Afghanistan and then transported to Iran by friendly forces on the ground, a former officer in the elite Quds Force branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards told The Daily Caller. [...]

However, photographs and video footage released by the Iranians on Dec. 8, several days after they announced the drone’s capture, clearly show that both wings had been neatly severed and then reattached.

“This suggests that the drone landed safely and that its wings were cut off so it could be transported by truck,” the former Quds Force officer said. “I believe it was captured by the Taliban inside Afghanistan and transferred to the Iranians, who then reattached the wings,” he added. (Daily Caller)

I don't know what happened, but that seems the most likely scenario. We have no friends over there. The Afghan soldiers we train end up shooting at our soldiers, and the billions in cash we lavish on that hopeless land is split between Karzai's gang of bandits and the Taliban...

Truth be known, neither the Karzai regime, nor the Taliban warlords, want the Americans out of Afghanistan. The treasure we pour into that country sustains the ruling cabal and the Taliban alike. We are the straight man at the bazaar, the stranger fleeced by the locals. (Fouad Ajami)

We are suckers.  We're being played for fools.  We are throwing our technological pearls before swine, and we are shedding American blood for people who hate us. Obama needs to wrap up Afghanistan in the same manner he did Iraq.  We'll take our drones away and let them get back to shooting down kites.

 
What do you think?

UPDATE:  Here's a story from Aviation Week with lots of technical details:  Iran UAV Will Not Expose Latest Technology

I Wracked and I Ran

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I make exceptions for the Middle East and the Muslim world, which gave us this definition of byzantine:

byzantine (from thefreedictionary.com)
a. Of, relating to, or characterized by intrigue; scheming or devious; b. Highly complicated; intricate and involved

That could also apply to our government, but they are not as smart as the Middle Eastern schemers, and we are broke...

Great powers gradually being shunted off the world stage have increasing difficulties getting their way: Itsy-bitsy colonial policing operations in dusty ramshackle outposts drag on for years and putter out to no obvious conclusion.  (Mark Steyn)

We've blown more that half a trillion dollars in South Asia trying to spackle over a 7th century crack in the modern-day global time-space continuum, with nothing to show for it.  We've shed our blood for people who hate us.  Liberals are outraged; conservatives should be.

The last thing we need is one more bloody foray into the bazaar

The Islamic world spawns lies wrapped in conspiracies that are encased in enigmas. And when they want to drag the west into it, they wrap it in photos of doe-eyed starving children and tie it up with sympathetic bows of womens rights and ribbons of religious tolerance and human rights. A horror-filled package wrapped in shiny paper and dime store baubles to appeal to naive western sentiments.  And happily peddled by American warmongers who have never been to war.

Put more bluntly, Ahmad Chalabi suckered us into Iraq, and this latest "Iranian plot" is more of the same.  For what purpose, I don't know.  All I do know is the whole thing stinks, and right now we'd be foolish to believe anything coming out about this.

If Frank Gaffney and Bill Kristol and other chicken-hawk dime store heroes want to attack Iran over this, they can raise their own damned army and go do it themselves.

The Zeta angle is more troubling

We have a far more serious situation brewing to our south, and we keep it going by participating in the criminal gangs' fundraisers, buying all they can send us and snorting it up our noses.  We jail gang members, where they make important business connections and alliances, and then spring them so they can head south to spread the latest American criminal techniques across Central America.

Which border is more important?  The one between Afghanistan and Pakistan?  Or our own Mexican border.  Which region is more important?  South Asia, or North America?

See also:
Andrew Napolitano - Government-generated Plots
Punching Holes in the Iran Plot

The Roots of Evil: Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan

It’s not often I agree with citizen of the world Thomas Friedman.  He’s the NY Times staff pseudo intellectual who writes glowingly of his admiration for the Chinese Poliburo.  In a rare spasm of lucidity, he nailed the Pakistan situation:

“Looking for Bin Laden became a side-business for Pakistan’s military to generate U.S. aid.  As the Al Qaeda expert Lawrence Wright observed in The New Yorker this week: Pakistan’s Army and intelligence service “were in the looking-for-Bin-Laden business, and if they found him they’d be out of business.” (Friedman - Bad Bargains)

Whatever we're looking for, a rotten pseudo-ally is willing to pretend to provide it

Iran:  Good People - Bad Government

Iran has a stranglehold on Lebanon via proxy Hezbollah.  It tentacles stretch from Afghanistan to Iraq and even to Venezuela and Argentina.  If Iran had a people’s revolution that brought true parliamentary democracy to the country (Iranians are more capable of democratic success than any other country in the region), that would put a stop to funding these global terrorists.  A newly-democratic Iran would have too many pressing issues at home for it to mess with funding terrorists, and no legitimate government wants to cultivate trouble with other nations, especially via such direct violence.

Why was Obama silent as the Iranian protesters were being slaughtered by the Revolutionary Guard?  Is it because they didn’t have Muslim Brotherhood or Al Qaeda membership cards?  I pray to God we are clandestinely helping the free people of Iran topple their rotten regime.

Saudi Arabia:  America's Most Shameful Alliance

We protect them in exchange for oil, and the Saudis maintain a pact with the Wahabbis.  Out of this dynamic metastasized militant Islam that has infected the globe:

During the 1980s, Saudi Arabia spent some $75 billion for the propagation of Wahhabism, funding schools, mosques, and charities throughout the Islamic world, from Pakistan to Afghanistan, Yemen, Algeria and beyond. ...  (Friedman - Bad Bargains)

We sought out and cultivated a relationship with Pakistan.  This is the grain of truth that spurs conspiracy nuts to claim the CIA trained Bin Laden.   The Pakistan bargain resembles our Saudi one;  We pay them to marginally cooperate with our goals in Afghanistan (first against the Soviet Union, now against Taliban and Al Qaeda forces), and they pretend to comply.  Meanwhile the Pakistani army rules the roost, papering it all over with a sham democracy.  And they’re a member of the Nuts with Nukes club.

What both countries need is shock therapy. For Pakistan, that would mean America converting the lion’s share of its military aid to K-12 education programs, while also reducing the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan. Together, the message would be that we’re ready to help Pakistan fight its real enemies and ours — ignorance, illiteracy, corrupt elites and religious obscurantism. 

Ditto Saudi Arabia. We are in a ménage à trois with the al-Sauds and the Wahhabis. We provide the al-Sauds security, and they provide us oil. The Wahhabis provide the al-Sauds with legitimacy and the al-Sauds provide them with money (from us). It works really well for the al-Sauds, but not too well for us.  (Friedman - Bad Bargains)

All three countries are full of good people, but our relationship with them is dysfunctional.  We are the bogey monsters of America-hating Mullahs, and our every action is twisted into a sinister threat to Islam.    

Unintended Consequences

I heard an older caller to a talk show say his father called WW II “The war to make the world safe for communism,” and there’s some cynical truth to that.  When confronted with the dual threat of communism, and fascism, Churchill made the smart choice to leave fighting the Bolshies until after we had defeated the fascists.  It took us another 45 years after the first victory to achieve the second.

We made a deal with the Saudis and the Pakistanis to dislodge the Soviets from Afghanistan.  Did we defeat Communism only to make Southwest Asia safe for Wahabbism?