As Americans leave work this July 3rd to prepare for our Independence Day celebrations, many Iranian families will at the same time be preparing a far more somber occasion of their own: the 25th anniversary of the US attack and downing of Iran Air Flight 655.
The world on July 3, 1988 was a very different place and the mood in front of the blue haze of the Aegis missile displays on the USS Vincennes was no doubt tense. The end of the Iran-Iraq war was still over a month away and the Strait of Hormuz was still an active battlefield.
25 years on we cannot begin to lay blame on the actions of any command and control decision aboard the USS Vincennes but we can recognize the potentially tremendous cost of human fallibility in the fog of war especially when it became yet another stumbling block in our relationship with Iran a quarter century ago.
A public review of the tapes from the USS Vincennes found the Iran Air 655 was inside the commercial flight corridor, was pinging the internationally recognized transponder code for a civilian aircraft, and was climbing away from the Vincennes but the fatal flaw was not responding to frequent and repeated calls from the American warship in English and Farsi. 45 seconds later the USS Vincennes cut the Airbus A300 in half by simultaneously firing two surface-to-air-missiles, killing all 290 aboard.
President Reagan issued a 151-word statement characterizing the US attack as a “proper defensive action” while offering condolences to the crew, passengers and their families but no real apology. The newly appointed Iranian commander in chief Hashemi Rafsanjani wisely urged against retaliation for the American “crime”. Many years later the United States paid reparations to the families through The International Court of Justice so the legal court case was settled but by that time the United States had no doubt lost the case in the court of hearts and minds of most Iranians.
Government apologies are never that straightforward. In rare and extreme cases, the U.S. Congress has passed joint resolutions as we did in 1988 for the forced interment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Presidents Bush and Clinton also offered their own apologies in later years. In 2006 Tony Blair apologized for the British role in the slave trade and the three million Africans sent to the Americas in British ships. While terrible, the downing of an aircraft doesn’t seem to rise to the level of these crimes but in this case, far, far more is at stake.
It may seem naïve to apologize to a country the United States is currently engaged in an open cyber war with while defending against escalating networks attacks from Iran and devising new attacks of our own. This is a hot war being played out across human intelligence and computer networks alike around fully half the globe and will continue with or without normalized relations with Iran.
The US Secretary of Defense under President Johnson, Robert McNamara, once said any military commander who is honest with himself will admit he has mistakes in the application of military power and has killed people unnecessarily through mistakes or errors of judgment just like that morning on the deck of the USS Vincennes. However, are we still willing to accept a world where the combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons can destroy nations even when rational actors are at the controls on both sides as we will likely see with Iran in the next decade?
With respect to the statement issued by President Reagan, if the question remains if an apology was ever issued or if it was a “statement of regret”, is it really an apology? More importantly should it matter? Should an apology today come from Congress? Perhaps a Presidential statement would suffice? Maybe a acknowledgement from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or a lone junior congressman?
How about I , as a private US citizen, start? I am sorry my country made a mistake 25 years ago and killed the innocent civilians 6 other countries, mostly from Iran. I am sorry the complexities of the Iran-Iraq war probably prevented the right and moral course of action in the form of a formal US apology and I am sorry the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 has cast a long, cold shadow of suspicion across what could have been the United States most significant relationship in the region along side Saudi Arabia. The color of my passport should not determine the value of my life and I am sorry the United States made such a mistake and has yet to make amends in the right way.
It is time to put this behind us. It is time for the United States to use any offering of humility and good faith to begin to repair our relationship with Iran, no question harmed on both sides, and open the door to a new relationship with President Hassan Rowhani. Would an apology in 2013 get the United States back to the lost opportunity of the 2003 Grand Bargain proposed by Tehran? Likely not, but If we don’t begin to explore the possible options now, the next mistake made in the fog of war may be marked by a mushroom cloud instead of a missing airliner.
Christian Cooper is a Truman Security Fellow.