Does he think he's Goldfinger?
Seriously, aside from the toyish look to this new weapon, Iran seems to be doing OK of late. Just some of the events not to make many front page headlines:
They captured Jund'Allah leader Rigi then executed him in one of their cities in Balochistan as an example. Rigi was working for the west, being leveraged against both Iran and Pakistan; some reports even said Pakistan fingered him to the Iranians. A rather large embarrassment, it would seem.
Hamid Karzai attended a summit in Tehran, a story virtually blacked out in major western media outlets. Now Karzai is saying he's working on a peace treaty with the Taliban.
For over two years now Iran has been operating a twice-a-month scheduled Iran Air flight between Tehran, Damascus and Caracas, Venezuela. There's no real reason for this other than provocation.
And now this--after Obama trumpets the toughest sanctions ever the Iranians reply by shooting missiles, starting the reactor at Bushehr using some fuel they've been processing themselves (with Putin in charge of monitoring), and this drone thing.
If one adds the fact they got away scot-free with a phony-baloney election and accompanying massacre, our awesome new world influence doesn't seem to be affecting them yet.
Still, Obama deserves at least some credit for trying to game them. He knew they would never accept his overtures to meet and therefore figured it would give the United States more leverage to form a coalition, and perhaps even the cover to take out their program, at some point. The likes of Sean Hannity can't appreciate such things but in hindsight it appears to be a fairly smart move on our part should we ever need to bomb bomb bomb Iran.
But that of course depends on what happens next. Is it any coincidence that after a public embarrassment in Washington, then Jerusalem, that Israel's Netanyahu has been very quiet of late?
After all, after the dust-up Obama did come out in tacit support of Jerusalem in the flotilla thing, which had to anger some on the professional left and their Friends of Palestine friends. Some may even see the naming of one of the next flotilla ships as the "Audacity of Hope" to be a provocation directed at Obama for not remaining true to his former liberal orthodoxy on the subject, especially with former Hyde Park friend Rashid Khalidi involved in that project.
The bottom line is whether we're seeing the execution of a game plan, which would explain the relative silence out of Israel after all this Iranian bluster, or whether the west in general is just at a loss for words. Or maybe everyone is on vacation. They seem to be popular of late.
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