Iran makes a huge show of blowing up 'US aircraft carrier' in explosive TV spectacle

[Hissyspit]

13. Sure, make fun of this, but no civilians on board, unlike the Iranians we blew to smithereens

in 1988. I still remember the cheers of the U.S. crew, before they realized that they had fucked up, when they shot down the Iranian civilian airliner with 66 children on board. Of course, they shouldn't have been cheering regardless.

Then the U.S. government refused to apologize (although they did make compensation through the international courts).

As pathetic as this spectacle is, they apparently didn't kill anyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

Iran Air Flight 655 was an Iran Air civilian passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai. On 3 July 1988, the aircraft operating this route was shot down by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes. The incident took place in Iranian airspace, over Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, and on the flight's usual flight path. The aircraft, an Airbus A300 B2-203, was destroyed by SM-2MR surface-to-air missiles fired from Vincennes.

All 290 on board, including 66 children and 16 crew, died.[1] This event ranks eighth among the deadliest disasters in aviation history, 11th if including the 9/11 attacks, which include ground casualties; the incident retains the highest death toll of any aviation incident in the Persian Gulf. The cruiser Vincennes had entered Iranian territorial waters after one of its helicopters drew warning fire from Iranian speedboats operating within Iranian territorial limits.[2][3]

According to the Iranian government, Vincennes negligently shot down the civilian aircraft: the airliner was making IFF squawks in Mode III (not Mode II used by Iranian military planes), a signal that identified it as a civilian craft (although all military aircraft IFF transponders are capable of generating Mode III replies as well).[4][5]

According to the United States government, the crew incorrectly identified the Iranian Airbus A300 as an attacking F-14A Tomcat fighter, a plane made in the United States and operated at that time by only two forces worldwide, the United States Navy and the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force. While the Iranian F-14s had been supplied by manufacturer Grumman in an air-to-air configuration only in the 1970s,[6][7] the crew of Vincennes had been briefed when entering the region that the Iranian F-14s had an iron bomb capability as well as Maverick missile and unguided rockets for air-to-surface.[8] The 53 page Pentagon report issued almost two months after the incident, while not directly stating the point, found that almost all of the immediate details given of the shooting-down were erroneous, yet absolved the officers and crew.[9]

According to Noam Chomsky and others,[9][10] compared to the reaction generated by the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, the incident triggered little reaction from Western mainstream media at the time.[11] The event generated a great deal of criticism of the United States amongst those who were able to learn of it. Some analysts blamed the captain of Vincennes, who had entered Iran's waters, for reckless and aggressive behavior in a tense and dangerous environment.[12][13]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/16/the-forgotten-story-of-iran-air-flight-655/

WorldViews
The forgotten story of Iran Air Flight 655

By Max Fisher October 16, 2013


If you walked into any high school classroom in the United States and asked the students to describe their country's relationship with Iran, you'd probably hear words like "enemy" and "threat," maybe "distrust" and "nuclear." But ask them what the number 655 has to do with it, and you'd be met with silence.

Try the same thing in an Iranian classroom, asking about the United States, and you'd probably hear some of the same words. Mention the number 655, though, it's a safe bet that at least a few of the students would immediately know what you were talking about.

The number, 655, is a flight number: Iran Air 655. If you've never heard of it, you're far from alone. But you should know the story if you want to better understand why the United States and Iran so badly distrust one another and why it will be so difficult to strike a nuclear deal, as they're attempting to do at a summit in Switzerland this week.

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.