Word: iranian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Simultaneously, Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran's Foreign Minister, was trying to convince the Security Council that the shootdown was deliberate. He read a transcript of conversations between the pilot of the doomed Airbus and Iranian flight controllers that seemed to indicate that Flight 655 had been proceeding at a normal altitude, speed and flight path. However, on one crucial point -- whether the U.S.S. Vincennes had tried to warn the Airbus -- the transcript was inconclusive. Flight 655 received no warnings, but the pilot may have been too busy chattering to his ground controllers to listen to an emergency channel over which...
...Sunday he was jangled awake in Camp David's Aspen Lodge at 4:52 a.m., even before the birds began to peep, and told that the Navy cruiser Vincennes may have shot down an Iranian F-14 in the Persian Gulf. By 8:11 a.m. he had a written message on reports that the downed plane may have been a civilian airliner. At 9:52 a.m. there was a call suggesting there was something to the story that an Airbus had been blown...
...that somber Sunday, July 3, Reagan dispatched a formal five-paragraph note to Iran expressing "deep regret." The President told aides he considered this an apology that satisfied the nation's obligations, but his public comments were measured in the extreme. Reagan allowed that the shooting down of the Iranian airbus was a "great tragedy," but soon belittled even that cliched description by also calling it an "understandable accident...
Social psychologists use the term "cognitive dissonance" for the anxiety caused when facts conflict with deeply held beliefs. Americans appear to have responded to the cognitive dissonance triggered by the Iranian airbus disaster by stifling both moral responsibility and collective grief. A Washington Post- ABC News poll found that 74% of those surveyed believe that Iran is more to blame than the U.S. for the destruction of Flight 655. Certainly this reaction was compounded by the role that Iran plays in American demonology. Nine years of demonstrators in Tehran chanting "Death to America!" have fueled an emotional climate where...
...destruction of the Iranian airbus should, by rights, lead to some form of searing national soul-searching. Whatever the provocation, whatever the perceived danger, whatever the rectitude of America's mission in the gulf, it was the Vincennes that fatally fired. The captain, who was only following proper procedures, may be free of personal fault. But no matter how understandable each of the Navy's actions, the fact remains that a string of American decisions created a situation that led to the shooting down of the Iranian airbus...