Which leads us to the blistering oddities of the current situation between the US and Iran. And indeed, the odd ways in which that situation involves air disasters.
The relationship between the two nations went bad during the Islamic Revolution there when Iranian students, who morphed into the Revolutionary Guard, took the American Embassy in Tehran and held those there hostage. President Carter attempted to secure the release of the hostages through diplomacy before ultimately deploying U.S. special forces in the form of the "Delta Force" in Operation Eagle Claw.
It failed.
Fuel calculations were botched and desert conditions intervened to lead to a USAF EC-130 running into a RH-53 helicopter sending both to the ground with loss of American life. It was a complete debacle and showed the depths to which the American military had declined following the Vietnam War. The US was shown to be impotent.
Following this, in 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 occupants on board the plane. The Vincennes had been harried by Iranian naval forces in a prolonged engagement that day and had actually crossed into Iranian waters in pursuit of them when the Iranian Airbus A300 was mistaken for an Iranian military aircraft and shot down. Unusual for the US, the US never acknowledged that the error was a culpable one and the crew was not disciplined in any fashion. In the Navy's view, the incident was a regrettable but not culpable event.
Iran has always viewed it differently and has marked the anniversary of the event repeatedly. It's one of the unifying events the Iranian people have with their government.
And now they've shot down their own airliner.
A lot has changed since 1979, let alone 1988. Iranians are no longer that keen on the theocracy and the majority of them would abandon it. Anecdotal evidence holds that a lot of Iranians have abandoned Islam itself with quite a few converting to Christianity very quietly. The well educated Iranian population chaffs at the strict tenants of Shia Islam and its well educated female population can look back to the 1970s when they weren't veiled and Iran was even unique in conscripting women, which says something about the government's view of its female population at the time. The Iranian government is going to change.
The recent American strike on an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general should have served to really being a uniting force between the Iranian people and their theocracy, and it did briefly. Now that seems to have already eroded. Even before this incident occurred Iranian twitter accounts were starting to argue against their really being support for the government and some even declared the targeted general to be a terrorist. Now the weakness of the country has really been exposed. The American military has really moved on, the Iranian one has not, and now its culpable for killing its own citizens by accident. And Iranians are back to protesting their government. The government's capitol on the 1988 event may now have been spent.
Where this leads nobody knows, but nobody could have predicted this course of events in any fashion.
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