Iran's Drone Announcement Pure Mockery of Obama

When a U.S. drone went down in eastern Iran last December, President Obama asked the Iranians if they might return it–pretty please–but they just grinned and said “no.”

Now, some five months later, they claim not only to have “recovered data” from the spy drone but are actually building a working copy of it. To bolster their claims, they’ve provided intelligence they say they gathered from the drone’s on-board computer, and the chief of the aerospace division of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has mockingly reported: “There is almost no part hidden to us in this aircraft.” Moreover, he claims they’ve even been able to recover “part of the data that had been erased.”

When the drone went down, numerous military men and politicians who had experience with the Iranians warned Obama to destroy the drone immediately. And when Obama chose instead to take the weak path duly described by Mitt Romney’s campaign as “Mother, may I?” foreign policy, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticism proved prophetic:

The right response would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air and, in effect, make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone, but [Obama] asked nicely for them to return it, and they aren’t going to.

So here we are, the world’s lone super power, albeit barely, and Iran is rubbing our face in the mud by telling the world everything it has ever wanted to know about U.S. spy drones. And whether Iran’s even telling the truth or not is beside the point. For they have succeeded in proving not only that Obama is a paper tiger but that he’s a toilet paper tiger, which is the weakest tiger of all.