A serious hat tip to Slate’s Fred Kaplan for refreshing our memory of an unsavory episode from America’s recent past, in July 1988, when a missile launched from the USS Vincennes blew up an Iranian airliner flying a regularly scheduled flight, killing all 290 on board. Fred, in his account, uses a slightly less inflammatory headline—“The time the United States blew up a passenger plane—and tried to cover it up”—but Fred and I are definitely on the same page. Here’s some of what Fred has to say:
shoot-down, and I have gone back over my clips, chronicling the official lies and misstatements as they unraveled. Here’s the truly dismaying part of the story. On Aug. 19, 1988, nearly seven weeks after the event, the Pentagon issued a 53-page report on the incident. Though the text didn’t say so directly, it found that nearly all the initial details about the shoot-down—the “facts” that senior officials cited to put all the blame on Iran Air’s pilot—were wrong. And yet the August report still concluded that the captain and all the other Vincennes’s officers acted properly.
For example, on July 3, at the first Pentagon press conference on the incident, Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the Iranian plane had been flying at 9,000 feet and descending at a “high speed” of 450 knots, “headed directly” for the Vincennes. In fact, however, the Aug. 19 report—written by Rear Adm. William Fogarty of U.S. Central Command—concluded (from computer tapes found inside the ship’s combat information center) that the plane was “ascending through 12,000 feet” at the much slower speed of 380 knots. “At no time” did the Airbus “actually descend in altitude,” the report stated.
When I pointed out this discrepancy at the press conference where the report was handed out, Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci waved me away and said, “It’s really questionable whether a different reading would have affected the judgment” to shoot down the plane. (I still find this astonishing).
So do I. But there’s more, supplied by Kenneth Pollack’s The Persian Puzzle, describing the frequently embarrassing history of U.S-Iranian relations. Kenneth tells us a few things that Fred left out. Among other things, U.S. ships operating in the Persian Gulf at the time had orders not to enter Iranian waters unless attacked. The Vincennes’s captain, Will Rogers III, managed to get around that little technicality by having a plane from his ship buzz an Iranian vessel, which promptly fired a few warning shots. The Vincennes was under attack! Well, sort of, and if it wasn’t, Captain Rogers was damned well going to pretend that it was!
Moving the Vincennes into Iranian waters placed the ship under the Iranian airliner’s flight path. The Vincennes knew about the flight, but the plane was 20 minutes late, and the Vincennes crew apparently hadn’t had much training with their new radar equipment and, and, well, you know, the fog of war and all that. Anyway, if the Iranians hadn’t flown their plane in front of our missile, none of this would have happened.
Fred notes that “Adm. George B. Crist, head of U.S. Central Command, issued a ‘non-punitive letter of censure’ to the ship’s anti–air warfare officer, but Secretary of Defense Carlucci withdrew the letter. Not only that, but two years later, Capt. Rogers was issued the Legion of Merit ‘for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service” as the Vincennes’ commander’.”
Afterwords
Fred also notes that both President Ronald “They call me Mr. Classy” Reagan and President George “They call me Mr. Prissy” Bush refused to compensate the victims’ families, leaving that embarrassing job to Bill Clinton, a damn sissy/Democrat, to whom such ballless behavior comes naturally.
