By Frank Gormlie
The Iranian airliner shot down looked much like this one.
Navy Ship Responsible From San Diego
The shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine on Thursday, July 17th – allegedly by separatists fighting the Kiev government – killing all 295 people on board, has shocked the world, and has intensified the demands for sanctions on those responsible.
But, if no sanctions materialize, it wouldn’t be the first time a civilian plane carrying hundreds of passengers was shot down by combatants – with nothing happening to those responsible.
In fact, a lot of the general elements are the same. But the incident that I am reminded about is the day – back in early July 1988, when two US military missiles fired from U.S. Navy ship Vincennes hit Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 passengers and crew members on board.
Nothing – I repeat – nothing ever happened to the U.S. because of this incident. It did go a long way in creating a deep distrust towards America by an entire generation of Iranians.
But nothing happened. No sanctions. No boycotts. No United Nations condemnations. Nothing. Most Americans alive then have probably forgotten about it.
In fact, when the USS Vincennes returned to its homeport, San Diego, it was welcomed with open arms, as any Navy ship returning is.
The Vincennes returns to San Diego.
Here is an article from the Washington Post in October 2013, titled “The forgotten story of Iran Air Flight 655″ by Max Fisher:
The story of Iran Air 655 begins, like so much of the U.S.-Iran struggle, with the 1979 Islamic revolution. When Iraq invaded Iran the following year, the United States supported Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein against the two countries’ mutual Iranian enemy. The war dragged on for eight awful years, claiming perhaps a million lives.
Toward the end of the war, on July 3, 1988, a U.S. Navy ship called the Vincennes was exchanging fire with small Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. Navy kept ships there, and still does, to protect oil trade routes. As the American and Iranian ships skirmished, Iran Air Flight 655 took off from nearby Bandar Abbas International Airport, bound for Dubai. The airport was used by both civilian and military aircraft. The Vincennes mistook the lumbering Airbus A300 civilian airliner for a much smaller and faster F-14 fighter jet, perhaps in the heat of battle or perhaps because the flight allegedly did not identify itself. It fired two surface-to-air missiles, killing all 290 passengers and crew members on board.
The horrible incident brought Tehran closer to ending the war, but its effects have lingered much longer than that. “The shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655 was an accident, but that is not how it was seen in Tehran,” former CIA analyst and current Brookings scholar Kenneth Pollack wrote in his 2004 history of U.S.-Iran enmity, “The Persian Puzzle.” “The Iranian government assumed that the attack had been purposeful. … Tehran convinced itself that Washington was trying to signal that the United States had decided to openly enter the war on Iraq’s side.”
That belief, along with Iraq’s increased use of chemical weapons against Iran, led Tehran to accept a United Nations cease-fire two months later. But it also helped cement a view in Iran, still common among hard-liners in the government, that the United States is absolutely committed to the destruction of the Islamic Republic and will stop at almost nothing to accomplish this. It is, as Time’s Michael Crowley points out in an important piece, one of several reasons that Iran has a hard time believing it can trust the United States to ever stop short of its complete destruction.
This is not just an issue of historical grievance: It matters in immediate geopolitical terms to the efforts by President Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to find their way to a nuclear deal and perhaps a first step toward detente. For any deal to work, both countries will have to trust that the other is sincere about its willingness to follow through on its promises. For the United States, that means trusting that Iran is really willing to give up any nuclear weapons ambitions and ramp down the program as promised (Washington has real, legitimate grounds to worry about this; Iran has its own history of misdeeds). For Iran, it means trusting that the United States will actually accept the Islamic Republic and coexist peacefully with it.
The eight-year war with Iraq, which is widely seen in Iran as a war against not just Hussein but his Western backers, and the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 that came near its conclusion, have convinced many in Iran that the United States simply cannot be trusted to let Iran be. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Rouhani’s boss, often appears to share this deep distrust. Khamenei and other hard-liners could scuttle any deal; a similar drama will likely play out in Washington.
If Iran believes that the United States is so committed to its destruction that it would willingly shoot down a plane full of Iranian civilians, then Tehran has every incentive to assume we’re lying in negotiations. It also has strong incentives to try to build a nuclear weapon, or at least get close enough to deter the American invasion that it feared was coming in 1988 and perhaps again in 2002 with President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech.
Americans might not know about Flight 655. But Iranians surely do — they can hardly forget about it.
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Jon Stewart mentioned the 1988 incident in Monday night’s “The Daily Show”. So far I have not seen anything about it in any other media.
In 1990, Capt. Will Rogers III was awarded the Legion of Merit decoration “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer … from April 1987 to May 1989.” (Washington Post)
Over at the OB Rag, a commenter left this:
The case went to court in the International Court of Justice (the United Nations Court). The United States and Iran agreed to a settlement “where the US recognized the aerial incident of 3 July 1988 as a terrible human tragedy and expressed deep regret over the loss of lives caused by the incident”. Additionally, the US paid $131.8 Million ($300,000 per wage earner, $150,000 per non-wage earner and approx $70 million for the plane).
Source: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/79/11131.pdf
After the shootdown, US Aegis cruisers were fitted with civilian radios to enable direct communication with airliners.
Again innocents pay the price of war. Increasingly, combatants are spared while civilians, men, women and children pay with their lives and the destruction of their property. Thanks, Frank, for reminding us that the US itself was involved in a similar mistake to the recent Malaysian Airlines tragedy. Perhaps then we shouldn’t be so self-righteous about blaming Putin for everything. In both cases the shoot downs were obviously mistakes. Not flying over war zones seems to be a pretty good albeit tragic lesson learned from this incident.
I was out on deployment with the USS Robison DDG-12 when this happned. Two years later on another deplyment with the same ship I met a couple crew members of the Vincennes when both of our ships were doing a port visit in Subic Bay. They (these crew members) made it very clear they didn’t want to talk about it.
Goatskull – thanks for sharing this personal history and bringing it all closer to home.
You’re very welcome Frank. Just to be clear, I don’t condone what happened. That being said, it’s easy for anyone who wasn’t there or was never in a situation like that to condemn everyone involved. The guys I meant I have no idea what their ratings or jobs were. I cannot imagine what those who were directly involved (the missile crew who actually targeted and fired) were going through after it was all over.
Frank, there are at least four other incidents of this type:
Siberian Airlines Flight SB 1812
October 4, 2001
78 Dead
Shot down by Ukraine
Korean Air Lines Flight 007
September 1, 1983
269 Dead
Shot down by the Soviet Union
Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870
June 27, 1980
80 Dead
Shot down by an unidentified warplane
Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114
February 21, 1973
108 Dead
Shot down by Israel
from Mother Jones
The United States government “expressed regret only for the loss of innocent life and did not make a specific apology to the Iranian government.”[11]
In February 1996, the United States agreed to pay Iran US$131.8 million in settlement to discontinue a case brought by Iran in 1989 against the U.S. in the International Court of Justice relating to this incident,[34] together with other earlier claims before the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal.[12] US$61.8 million of the claim was in compensation for the 248 Iranians killed in the shoot-down: $300,000 per wage-earning victim and $150,000 per non-wage-earner. In total, 290 civilians on board were killed, 38 being non-Iranians and 66 being children. It was not disclosed how the remaining $70 million of the settlement was apportioned, though it appears a close approximation of the value of a used A300 jet at the time.
shame for Will Rogers and Bush!