there's much more below the surface in the situation the empire has cooked up surrounding iran;

Even after facing toughest US sanctions in history and severe economic conditions for many months now, Iran continues to stand tall in front of US economic and military aggression. Certainly, the US based “Iran experts” advising the Trump administration never expected such level of resilience and resistance. On the contrary, what they expected was an Iranian capitulation under “maximum pressure” and a victory for the US For Iran, imposition of sanctions is, as its leaders have expressed many times, an act of war and the Iranian act of downing a US spy drone speaks volumes about Iranian preparation to face a US military aggression. Most certainly, the US policy makers were not expecting such action from the Iranian side; hence, the shocking surprise at the Iranian “counter pressure” tactics. The downing of a spy drone is no small act. Consider this:

The drone that the US military uses has a price tag much higher than its latest F-35 stealth fighters. The drone per unit cost is around $176 million; while an F-35A fighter costs around $89 million. But the price tag is itself not the whole story. A drone is by default designed in a way to be much harder for air defence systems to track and hit. Flying at an altitude of 65,000 feet, the RQ-4 done could only be hit by a highly sophisticated surface-to-air missile. Speaking of Iranian capability, the downing of an ultra-modern drone has left many in Washington scratch their heads. While some got disillusioned, others did war-mongering.

An attack was ordered and later on aborted, if we’re to believe the US president. The act of abortion is not heroic; rather it spotlights the embarrassing situation the US is caught in and practically knows no way out of. The story of ‘attack and abortion’ appears to be no more than a way out of embarrassment that was caused by a high-profile spy mission over Iran going horribly wrong. It is possible that hawks in Washington might have pressed for war; after all, this is what they have always wanted and have never made any attempts at concealing their intentions. But the fact that a US attack did not happen shows the gradually prevailing realisation in Washington that the Iranian case poses far bigger challenge than Afghanistan and Iraq and that an attack on Iran would unleash forces that the US wouldn’t be able to control............https://journal-neo.org/2019/06/24/the-u-s-is-self-embarrassingly-caught-in-the-gulf/