Frontline: “At the top of Iran’s power structure is the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the Iranian Revolution, upon Khomeini’s death in 1989. Khomeini and Khamenei are the only two men to have held the office since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979.”

After Iran shot down the Ukrainian Passenger Jet liner with a rocket, I got the impression that everyone is running around with rocket launchers and guns in Iran.

However, wait a moment.

The rocket which shot down that airliner was a very sophisticated rocket, designed to track the jet engine heat source of the jet aircraft it was aimed at and to follow that heat source at a much faster speed than the aircraft it was aimed at, to explode at the heat source and bring the aircraft down.
Probably it cost the equivalent of $500,000 or more and it was deadly, once launched and was not the sort of toy, you would expect any of the general population in Iran to be able to afford, yet alone own one.
So who would own that sort of sophisticated ground launched weapons system for use against any sort of jet aircraft, especially one which had just taken off and was at maximum jet thrust to get the passenger aircraft up to a safe operating height and where would the command for its use, have originated from?
What I find interesting, is that the rocket was used against a Ukrainian Passenger Jet aircraft with the loss of all (134) onboard, bearing in mind that Russia and de facto Ukraine, would probably have funded and supplied the rocket system used to knock down its own aircraft.
So how would that have happened?
Military personnel would have waited at the end of the runway, waiting specifically, for that jet to take off and once it had flown overhead, the sophisticated missile was launched, probably from a hand held launch system, in the general direction of the jet’s exhaust and it was a “kill”, as soon as that rocket launch took place.
“By accident”, like there were no other aircraft taking off at the same time as that Ukrainian passenger jet, so how could it have been an accident, when it was so obviously a cold blooded, determined attack on an Iranian “allies” defenseless passenger jet, the jet from their financial and military support provider – Russia.
I hope Vladimir Putin bears that in mind and is not so enthusiastic about providing ongoing support for Iran, when Iran is visibly capable of turning on the hand that feeds it and biting it off, “by accident”.

Just Sayin’