Mere Rhetoric: Breaking: If Iran Shot Down A US Drone, Did They Do It With Parts They Got From Russia Or The US?

If you spend enough time feeding at the intertroughs, you begin to go a little bit crazy.

Xinhua passes on a boast from an Iranian lawmaker that last week's widely-reported explosion in Iran was because Iran shot down a US spy drone. There was some speculation about this already, which makes it impossible to know whether the lawmaker said this (a) because he heard it and thought it'd be fun to pass on or (b) because he actually knows something. Or (c) because he heard it in a wacky dream, and is kind of insane.

How might Iran have acquired technology sufficiently advanced to shoot down US air assets? It's a game of competing news wires. Reuters breaks that Iran gets - and will continue to get - their anti-aircraft missiles from Russia:

Russia has delivered new anti-aircraft missile systems to Iran and will consider further requests by Tehran for defensive weapons, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said on Tuesday. "We have supplied the modern short-range anti-aircraft systems TOR-M1 in accordance with our contracts," Ivanov told reporters. "Iran is not under sanctions and if it wants to buy defensive ... equipment for its armed forces then why not?"

There's a nice sense of tidiness here, wherein Russia protects the nuclear technology that they gave to Iran with anti-aircraft missiles that they're giving to Iran.

But the AP says that there's something a little more complicated going on, and that Iran has been getting spare parts for their air power by working through front companies that shop at... (wait for it)... US military surplus sales:

It is no secret to defense experts that valuable technology can be found amid surplus scrap. On a visit to a Defense Department surplus site about five years ago, defense consultant Randall Sweeney literally stumbled upon some that should not have been up for sale. "I was walking through a pile of supposedly de-milled electrical items and found a heat-seeking missile warhead intact," Sweeney said, declining to identify the surplus location for security reasons. "I carried it over and showed them. I said, 'This shouldn't be in here.'"

Awesome. Just awesome. Good to see that those really powerful UN sanctions - imposed in the context of Iran developing nuclear technology that they've promised to use to eradicate six million Jews - are working out as well as expected.

Previously: Turns Out, Iran Won't Stop Developing The Nukes That They Really, Really Want, Iran Might Not be a Stabilizing Force in the Middle East After All, Democratic Leader "Pleased" Israel Has No Plans To Defend Itself From Iran