3 ms·

Even more reason to not be surprised that the Iranians shot at the US.

• mpyne 13y ago
  Just so I'm clear, you're saying that a country preventing their own merchant ships from being attacked in order to maintain free trade on international waters in accordance with international law justifies blowing up one of that country's warships?
  • jlgreco 13y ago
    I'm saying that war is shit, but if you are in one then don't expect not to get shot at. There is no sense acting indignant about it. They were not shot at out of the blue, there was an existing conflict. In this discussion it hardly matters who was on the right side of the overall conflict, however, in this specific engagement: the Iranians shooting at the Americans was reasonable and should not have surprised anybody; the Americans shooting back was reasonable and should not have surprised anybody. The only real problem was the American shooting at the airliner.
    • ensignavenger 13y ago
      Keep in mind too that the Americans did not know it was a commercial airliner. It certainly was not a deliberate targeting of a civilian plane.
      • jacquesm 13y ago
        Actually, according to the WP article sources they did.
        • mpyne 13y ago
          There were Americans on nearby warships who knew (and arguably, should have provided forceful backup; but the other warships had far inferior radars and thought that Vincennes knew something they didn't). The watchstanders on Vincennes did not know. They should have known, but there was no "bright line" that makes a given radar target look automatically civilian or automatically military on the display. Watchstanders and the CO have to make that determination based on a confluence of factors, including IFF transponder frequency, flight plan, whether the craft is ascending/descending, etc. The CO came to the conclusion early that the indications he had were of an attacking aircraft. Part of that was based on a determination that the aircraft was descending in a hostile attack pattern. It wasn't, and the AEGIS radar showed as much. But when the life-or-death decision point for your ship rests on whether you see a '-' or a '+' next to a altitude change rate it's not astonishing when a watchstander makes the wrong call. The Vincennes watchstanders tried hailing the aircraft two times, but didn't get a response. But even that didn't really help resolve the issue; was it an hostile aircraft maintaining radio silence or a confused civilian airliner? They used a frequency a civilian airliner could have picked up, but it turns out there were several other frequencies the airliner could have been monitoring as well, and besides... how was the Iran Air 655 pilot to know Vincennes was ever referring to them? Vincennes was having to make a hail to the effect of "unidentified aircraft south of Bandar abbas with speed 350 knots, heading 210, you are on a hostile course and this warship will take defensive measures". What civilian airliner pilot would think that applied to them (though Vincennes quoted speed-over-ground and not the airspeed the pilot would have been looking at). So there were tons of 'Final Destination'-esque problems that occurred here, but foremost of all was that the watchteam (CO and CIC watchstanders both) determined early based on a single misread indication that they were being attacked, and the evidence they had available to them after that could easily be construed to support that determination.
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    The US administration agreed to reflag Kuwaiti tankers as US tankers as a dodge around US law that prohibited the US from convoying foreign merchant ships, as part of administration's broad policy of support for Iraq's unprovoked and extended war of aggression aimed specifically at seizing particular Iranian territory, mainly Persian Gulf ports. (Why protect Kuwaiti tankers as part of supporting Iraq's war? Because the reason Kuwaiti tankers were being targetted was because Kuwait was spending billions of dollars supporting the war; Iran was attacking the flow of money supporting Iraq's war effort.) The entire operation (and several other operations close in time in the Persian Gulf) was the US administration choosing to directly intervene in support of Iraq in the war with Iran; the limited scope of the intervention was a matter of sell it, above all to US domestic audiences, as something other than the direct support for Iraq that it was.
    • mpyne 13y ago
      I understand that there were way more geopolitical considerations than just "Iran bad Kuwait good". Whatever other problems Iran might have with Kuwait, didn't justify closing off the whole Persian Gulf. And if the U.S. wanted to re-enact a modern form of the old "Cash and Carry" plan they imposed on the U.K. before Pearl Harbor, then they were within their rights to do so as well as long as they obeyed UNCLOS. The additional U.S. direct intervention on the side of Iraq (e.g. weapons, training) has been pretty conclusively demonstrated to have been stupid and unhelpful with regard to geopolitical stability in the Middle East (several times over, by now). But in any event, if Iran had really wanted to blockade Kuwait then they should have declared war and blockaded Kuwait (it doesn't exactly have a wide coastline), instead of mining international waters. At least then they would have the moral high ground should the U.S. still have decided to intervene.