History repeats itself in Iran

It has become fairly obvious, whatever the Iranian authorities may say now or later, that Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was shot down after departing Tehran. This was, in truth, overwhelmingly probable the moment the news broke, but there was still widespread shock and disbelief on Thursday when several Western heads of government announced signal- intelligence evidence of a missile strike. There are still “How could such a thing happen?” reactions pouring forth — mostly from people who are old enough, in theory, to recall the USS Vincennes accidentally shooting down an Iran Air Airbus A300 in 1988.

I say “in theory,” but the truth is that popular memory of the Vincennes incident has been much diminished — outside Iran — by later events in the region. This must qualify as one of the good Lord’s most sadistic jests. The United States wasn’t officially at war with anyone in the region at the moment when its besttrained sailors, equipped with scorchingly new and uncannily powerful missile and battlespace- mapping technology, blew up a commercial airliner full of religious pilgrims.

The Navy was in the Gulf not to fight or oppose anybody in particular, but to protect neutral shipping from the Iran- Iraq War. Up to the time of the accident, it was Iraq that demonstrably presented the greater danger to American warships. Ronald Reagan was still president. The First Gulf War wouldn’t kick off until 1990.

In other words: we forgot. The memory of Vincennes was overwritten by a generation of Middle East conflict, like an old computer file.

Which leaves a paradox. Liberals who regard recent U. S. history as one enormous, indistinguishable mass of bloodthirsty actions don’t seem especially aware of one of the most horrifying tactical blunders in American military history. What’s one jet plane more or less in the black ledger of imperialism? Conservatives, meanwhile, are racing to accuse Iran of “murder” in the case of Flight 752.

Blunders can be worse than crimes, according to one of the most famous of all military maxims. But if one points out that Iran’s “murder” of innocents is starting to look like a nightmarish replay of Vincennes, one risks being accused of postulating “moral equivalence” between the United States and Iran.

Well, unless the investigation of Flight 752 yields some astonishing surprise, the moral equivalence is sure to be found lying there among the facts. If you accuse A of murder ( or culpable incompetence) for doing exactly what B did in the past, it is you completing the equation. Perhaps it does not matter much: the accusation in question appears to be mostly a means for Canadians to direct futile cries for revenge at an unhappy, checked- out Liberal prime minister.

The forgetting of the Vincennes tragedy was one of two major reasons people have been slow to connect the dots on Flight 752. The other reason is that recent headlines have conditioned us to accept the idea of Boeing aircraft falling randomly out of the sky. But the doomed plane was not a 737 Max; it was a 737- 800, one of the bestselling and safest airframes in the annals of flight. If you look up the handful of hull- loss 737- 800 accidents, what will strike you is mostly how inept or unfortunate pilots have to be to wreck one. The Bayesian probabilities in favour of a missile were overwhelming before Thursday’s round of announcements, and may not even have changed much.

So how could it happen? Everyone is well aware that Flight 752 was brought down in the midst of a missile attack by Iran on coalition forces in Iraq. Iranian air defence personnel would, like the crew of USS Vincennes in 1988, have had their ears flooded with speculative intelligence warnings and theories about retaliatory boogeymen.

It was allegedly natural for the American ship in 1988 to be on the lookout for attackers disguising themselves as commercial aircraft, and the

BLUNDERS CAN BE WORSE THAN CRIMES.

persons responsible for the deaths were given medals on the premise that they had behaved with the safety of the ship uppermost in mind. This, indeed, is the guiding spirit of the investigation that was conducted by the Navy. Its goal was to satisfy itself that Americans ( in Iranian littoral waters) had acted with some plausible intention of protecting their own lives.

As long as people use airplanes for both war and travel, there will always have to be an active, thinking, nervous human in the air defence decision loop. ( No one would be allowed to get far in inventing the aerial equivalent of a land mine.) If we, as Canadians, receive the benefit of a thorough investigation of Flight 752, it will involve identifying that person and accounting for his actions. Canada is in no position to compel such an investigation, and we shouldn’t hold our breaths for a formal apology, either: Iran never got one from the U. S. for the Vincennes incident.

But even the best we can hope for is probably a reprise of what happened after Vincennes. Some scribbling officer with an imaginative streak will be employed to describe the terror and confusion of an anti- aircraft battery in the middle of nowhere, awaiting godlike retaliation from the U. S. military. He probably won’t even have to lie much.