
Its goal was to satisfy itself that Americans (in Iranian littoral waters) had acted with some plausible intention of protecting their own lives.Īs 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. This, indeed, is the guiding spirit of the investigation that was conducted by the Navy. It was allegedly natural for the American ship in 1988 to be on the lookout for attackers disguising themselves as commercial aircraft, and the persons responsible for the deaths were given medals on the premise that they had behaved with the safety of the ship uppermost in mind. Photo by REUTERS/Chris Helgren/File Photo 9, 2020, vigil in Toronto for the victims of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, which crashed in Iran on Jan. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 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. 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. The Bayesian probabilities in favour of a missile were overwhelming before Thursday’s round of announcements, and may not even have changed much. 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. 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. The other reason is that recent headlines have conditioned us to accept the idea of Boeing aircraft falling randomly out of the sky. The forgetting of the Vincennes tragedy was one of two major reasons people have been slow to connect the dots on Flight 752.


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. If you accuse A of murder (or culpable incompetence) for doing exactly what B did in the past, it is you completing the equation. Well, unless the investigation of Flight 752 yields some astonishing surprise, the moral equivalence is sure to be found lying there among the facts.

737-800 aircraft, operated by Ukraine International Airlines, which crashed shortly after takeoff near Shahedshahr, Iran, on Wednesday, Jan. Rescue workers search the smouldering wreckage of a Boeing Co. 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. Article contentīlunders can be worse than crimes, according to one of the most famous of all military maxims. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.
