An event took place which is worth looking at in detail...just in case President Obama trots out the tall tale again that's he's not an appeaser and is decisive when it comes to foreign policy.
This latest episode started when a top secret American RQ-170 Sentinel drone went down over Iran a few days ago.
The Obama Administration's first impulse was to deny it...until the Iranians showed it on state television.
The RQ 170 is a fairly complex piece of gear, and stories differ as to what happened. The DoD says it malfunctioned. The Iranians say they used a top secret technique to bring the drone down electronically.
Such things happen, and knowing what I know about Iran's state of technology, my personal leaning is towards a malfunction.But the real malfunction apparently occurred afterwards, in the White House.
This is a perfect example of the 3 AM call scenario. For whatever reason, we had a top secret piece of equipment on the ground in the hands of our enemies. As ex-VP Dick Cheney relates below, President Obama was presented with 3 options to get the drone back in our hands including destroying it before the Iranians could plumb it's intelligence and the technology involved. His response? To do nothing, because he was afraid Iran might be mad at us...so he just asked for it back politely:
As if the Iranians were going to comply! The first part of their response was to openly mock the president and the US:
"The Americans have perhaps decided to give us this spy plane," Ahmadinejad said. "We now have control of this plane."
Speaking through an interpreter, Ahmadinejad said: "There are people here who have been able to control this spy plane, who can surely analyze this plane's system also. ... In any case, now we have this spy plane."
(ed. note..in Farsi, this could also have been translated as "This plane is now our property.")
He added, "Very soon, they're going to learn more about the abilities and possibilities of our country."
On Tuesday, a semi-official Iranian news agency said authorities have shrugged off the U.S. request. Defense Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi said the United States should apologize for invading Iranian air space instead of asking for the return of the unmanned aircraft.
Cheney of course asks the ultimate question..why not simply destroy the ground, ideally when there are a crowd of Iranian technicians poking around it? If our unmanned drones aren't engineered to explode when a certain radio signal or computer code is transmitted to them, a cruise missile would have done the job quite nicely. Instead, the president once again allowed a valuable piece of technology to fall into enemy hands because he was scared Iran,who has been in a state of war with us for thirty years and has been openly guilty of hostile action might take it the wrong way!
The Iranians didn't content themselves with just ridicule. They announced a sequence of 'war games for their navy with the explicit purpose of practicing maneuvers to shut down the Persian Gulf at the Strait of Hormuz, a four mile wide channel though which most of the crude exported from Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Emirates, Kuwait and Iraq passes through.
The Iranian energy minister told Al Jazeera television last month that Tehran was making plans to use oil as a political weapon if there were any future conflicts over its nuclear rogue program.
They have absolutely no reservations of provocative actions of this sort. You see, the Iranians know very well exactly what sort of man they're dealing with in President Obama.
One final word about the re-engineering, courtesy of Wired...it's unlikely the Iranians can pull it off:
“Someone will figure out the [materials'] composition,” the Boeing engineer explains, “but producing them is entirely a different matter.”
For the drone vivisectionists, it only gets worse. After examining the (alleged) RQ-170′s airframe, they will likely focus on its sensors. We don’t know for sure what devices the Sentinel carries, but it could include video cameras and a ground-mapping radar. The Darpa robot designer says the RQ-170′s radar — if it carries one — could share subsystems with the radars on the latest F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters, which might give U.S. adversaries some insight into how those planes operate, too.
But the designer isn’t too worried. “Even if [the radar] showed up completely intact, they may not know how to use it because they don’t know how to use the software.”
Moreover, the software includes classified anti-tamper measures. At least, it’s supposed to, according to the Boeing engineer. “Dumbest thing in the world if it didn’t.”
So maybe we got lucky. Or maybe we didn't. Blowing up the drone certainly would have made sure, and denied the Mullahs a propaganda coup.
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