Another move towards war?

Once again this is news that does not seem to have ‘made’ the NZ media even though it is already on the RT site - so must be several hours old.

Drone 'shot down' in Iran may belong to US

NATO-led military force in Afghanistan says the unmanned aerial vehicle had gone out of control late last week.

al Jazeera,

Last Modified: 04 Dec 2011 19:36

A surveillance drone flying over western Afghanistan had gone out of control late last week and may be the one Iran said it had shot down over its own airspace, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has said.

"The UAV to which the Iranians are referring may be a US unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week. The operators of the UAV lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status," an ISAF statement said on Sunday.

The statement was issued in Kabul and released to reporters covering an international conference on Afghanistan in the German city Bonn.

A US official told the Reuters news agency that there is "absolutely no indication" up to this point that the drone that crashed in Iran was shot down.

Iranian media reported on Sunday that its forces had brought down an unmanned US spy plane.

"Iran's military has downed an intruding RQ-170 American drone in eastern Iran," Iran's Arabic-language Al Alam state television network quoted an unnamed source as saying on Sunday.

The state news agency IRNA and the the semiofficial Fars news agency reported that the plane is now in the possession of Iran's armed forces. The Fars news agency is close to the powerful Revolutionary Guard.

Fars reported that the drone had been brought down through a combined effort by Iran's armed forces, air defence forces and its electronic warfare unit after the plane briefly violated the country's airspace at its eastern border.

The drone "was downed with slight damage. It is now under the control of our forces," Fars reported, quoting an unnamed military source.

The source warned that Iran's armed response would "not be limited to our country's borders" for the "blatant territorial violation".

Al Alam state television network reported the same news on Sunday.

Other 'downed drones'

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, told Al Jazeera that Iran has made similar claims even as recently as July.

"It could be quite feasible but we don’t know yet. What we do know is that in the absence of any diplomatic channels incidents like this can have tremendous repercussions, far greater then when there were some de-escalatory mechanisms in place between the United States and Iran."

In January, Iran also announced that its forces had downed two US drones after they violated Iranian-controlled airspace.

It said it would put the aircraft on display to the public, but there has been no indication it ever did so.

In June, Brigadier General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Guards' aerospace unit, said Iran had shown Russian experts the US drones in its possession.

"Russian experts requested to see these drones and they looked at both the downed drones and the models made by the Guards through reverse engineering," he said.

Hajizadeh did not specify how many US drones were shown nor gave any details of the copies Iran was said to have made of the aircraft.

The US military and the CIA routinely use drones to monitor military activity in the region.

They have also reportedly used them to launch missile strikes in Yemen as well as in Afghanistan and in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt.

Iran holds frequent military drills, primarily to assert an ability to defend against a potential US or Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities.

Iran is locked in a dispute with the US and its allies over Tehran's disputed nuclear programme, which the West believes is aimed at the development of nuclear weapons. Iran denies the accusations, saying its programme is entirely peaceful.

and the Russian point-of-view

America’s great game could spark World War Three’

Following the latest report that the Iranian military has shot down a US drone in eastern Iran, radio host Stephen Lendman told RT such US reconnaissance missions point towards greater ambitions for domination, which might lead to all-out war.

With diplomatic tensions reaching a boiling point between Iran and the West, Lendman believes such spying operations are part and parcel of a greater war that the United States has been waging against Iran for decades.  

“Since the 1970s America has had a running on-and-off war with Iran, basically wanting to change the regime, to make it subservient to US interests, and Iran has the crazy notion that it believes it has the right to its own sovereignty, to run its own government, to conduct its own affairs, it doesn’t have to answer to Washington. Washington disagrees, and therein lies the conflict,” he said.  

Lendman also claims US Special Forces are already operating within Iran, as he believes the build-up for an attack is becoming imminent.  According to Lendman, recent events in Libya, Syria, and now Iran, point towards a greater drive to rein in everyone who might be opposed to unrestrained US power.  

“America has had for some years, especially since the Bush years, what they call the greater Middle East project. The project is total dominance over the region, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, to Russia’s borders. Russia of course is being surrounded with US military bases, China as well. This is part of America’s game. They’re trying to eliminate countries that are not in America’s orbit. So there was a war on Libya and Syria is being targeted. The Libyan model is being replicated in Syria, so far short of NATO bombing. If Syria is delinked from Iran, Iran is next.  "There could be an insurgency in Iran, the same as in Libya, the same as in Syria, very possibly conflict follows.” 

Following a November 8 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report which claimed Iran had been actively developing nuclear weapons, Lendman counters that no country has been more transparent with the IAEA than Iran.  

However, Lendman believes that if the allegations regarding nuclear weapons are used to justify war, Iran, unlike Libya, is a big country with a powerful military, and any unjustified strike by Israel or the US could prove disastrous.    

“Iran has been very bluntly saying, if it is attacked by Israel, by America, it will respond, it will fire back. It can attack Israeli cities, it can attack US bases. We’re talking about something very serious, we’re talking about the possibility of general war, dare I say it, World War III.”