Friction

Iran fired at one of our drones over the Persian Gulf prior to our election, but missed. I'm not too worked up that we are just hearing about it now since it is another flying elbow in our long confrontation with Iran. If Iran killing hundreds of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan (mostly by supplying insurgents and terrorists) hasn't gotten America ready to rumble, this would not have outraged Americans.

Iran threw another elbow:

According to the timeline provided by the Pentagon, two Iranian SU-25 "Frogfoot" aircraft intercepted the American drone at about 4:50 a.m. EST (0850 GMT) as it conducted a routine, but classified, surveillance mission over Gulf waters about 16 nautical miles off the Iranian coast.

Iran has been at war with us for several decades now, ever since they seized our embassy and held our diplomats hostage for over a year.

We smashed up their navy in the 1980s, "tilted" to Iraq in their war with Iran to keep Iran from winning that war, and suffered hundreds of dead Marines in Lebanon at the hands of Iranian-backed terrorists; and we fought their proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last decade.

Lately we've hit the Iranians with cyber-weapons to slow down their nuclear work. And the Iranians plotted to plant bombs in Washington, D.C. If that wasn't an act of war, this is nothing of note.

At least it wasn't hostage situation.

I don't think we should let this slide. By all means, use some of our cruise missiles to take down some Revolutionary Guards assets. But this is what happens when you are in a quasi-war with some nutball nation.

And just what part of Iran were we 16 nautical miles off of? Kharg Island? Iranians islands in the Strait of Hormuz? Around Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor? Were we simply helping to protect Iraq's coastal waters?

Iran surely knows where the drone was. Why isn't this in the news for us? Just what "international shipping" were we monitoring as I hear on the news? WMD shipments? Oil smuggling? Traffic to and from Iraq and/or Kuwait?

But the bottom line is that we have been in a war with Iran for some time. Unless we unleash our new flexibility to give Iran what they want, stuff like this will happen. Be happy we didn't risk a manned platform.

UPDATE: Oh, and there is always the possibility that the Iranians think of this as retaliation if we (rather than the usual suspects in Israel) were behind that munitions factory attack last month in Sudan. We don't even have to have been responsible if the Iranians just think we did it.