Think back three years ago, to the time when the entire mainstream media was telling the world that the Steele dossier was a genuine product of the intelligence community. Admit it: You had a sneaking suspicion, even if you didn’t tell anyone at the time, that the Steele dossier had Hillary Clinton’s grubby fingerprints on it somehow. Your suspicions were proved correct in the end.

More recently, you’ve probably felt fairly confident that a certain billionaire pedophile did not kill himself in his super-max prison cell while on suicide watch. You believe this despite lots of smart people telling us that it was just a series of failures on the part of prison employees. But history is going to judge your suspicions correct on that one as well.

Now it’s time to make admission to yourself: You have a sneaking suspicion that Iran shot down that Ukrainian passenger jet the other day, killing all 176 civilians on board.

If you do feel that way, that’s good. Because all of the evidence points to a nervous Iranian surface-to-air missile controller having an itchy trigger finger on the night when Iran launched a bunch of missiles at some of Iraq’s strategic gravel reserves.

Iran launched two missile attacks that hit near bases inside Iraq, where a handful of US troops were stationed. Brett Baier on Fox News had a really smart observation about the attacks as they were unfolding that night. Iran was putting on a show of force in a tit-for-tat response to President Trump’s targeted assassination of terror leader Qassem Soleimani.

The effect of those two attacks was to blow up some of Iraq’s vital sand-and-desert infrastructure, which resulted in zero American casualties. Brett Baier noted that the attack was probably sending a message, and that Iran was simply saving face without launching a war.

Why blow up some sand near those two military bases, where there were just a handful of US servicemen present, Baier noted, when there’s a much larger US military base in Iraq, chock full of US troops, which is a lot closer to Iran?

Iran wasn’t trying to kill Americans in that attack. It was just showing its friends that it’s not weak and not afraid of the US. But naturally, the poor schmucks in Iran’s military had to be nervous about a potential US counterattack. Iran’s air force has only about 500 planes, all of which utilize nifty 50-year-old technology. If Trump wanted to mess Iran up in a hurry, he could have done so and the Iranians on the ground had to be nervously expecting it.

So, when a civilian jetliner took off from Tehran and entered the screen on some nervous Iranian soldier’s 40- to 50-year-old radar system, somebody pushed the button and shot the plane out of the sky, murdering 176 civilians. It sure looks and feels that way.

The plane was a three-year-old Boeing 737-800. Iran immediately blamed the crash on engine failure. Knowing that NTSB crash investigations in the US generally take several months or even years to fully complete, this explanation seemed… a tad premature. Especially after someone managed to capture a cell phone video of the plane crashing back to earth in a fiery ball. Engine failures typically don’t result in planes exploding.

In fact, we’ve seen engine failures in Boeing 737s before, in which the pilots simply glide the plane to the ground. Remember the Clint Eastwood-directed film “Miracle on the Hudson” with Denzel Washington? It’s scary when it happens, but it’s possible to still land a modern passenger jet when the engines fail.

Given that this was a new plane (much newer than Iran’s entire air force!) with an experienced pilot crew, it’s strange that the plane’s systems all went offline in an instant. Almost as if a surface-to-air missile had struck it.

And now, Iran is refusing to hand over the black boxes from the airplane for any outside body to inspect. We’ll just have to take their word for it that this was some sort of mechanical failure that coincidentally happened on the same night when they were launching a missile strike at US forces in the region. Uh huh.

Take this one to the bank: Hillary Clinton paid for the Russian collusion Steele dossier, Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself, and Iran shot down that plane full of civilians.