They say four, you say three, I say . . .

By now, everyone who cares has probably heard that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards tried photoshopping their way to intimidation by altering a shot of a screwup into a success, replacing a missile launch failure with a copy of a successful one. The shot on the left is the one they released first; the other is the (supposedly) real version:



A better view of the (supposedly) undoctored version:





I say 'supposedly' because everything in the image should be treated with suspicion; start with the varying trajectories and make yourself crazy from there...

I'm no analyst so we'll let the experts digest the tea leaves, but I would point out that the missile on the erector - and it would seem the others - isn't a Shahab-3, Iran's medium range ballistic missile* that's got everyone's panties in a twist. At best (worst?) that's a theater missile, with a much shorter range and smaller payload. And if that photo is real, it looks to have about as much chance of hitting its target as I have of nailing a muskrat with a headshot at half a mile with a .44 . . .

Still hurts if you get hit with with it, of course. And you might argue that Iran's ineptness only makes them more dangerous, not less . . .

* - Another weapon whose accuracy and specs remain to be proven, but we'll leave that for another day. There's no question that it is a potent missile, at least on paper, though.