A Lot of Questions

First came shock at the news that a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf had shot down an Iranian airliner, with the apparent loss of all 290 people aboard. Then came bewilderment over how such an appalling mistake could be made. The guided-missile cruiser Vincennes has been advertised as the latest in high-tech surface vessels, a $1-billion weapons platform that supposedly can identify hundreds of potential targets at once and simultaneously engage in anti-air, anti-submarine and anti-ship warfare. Maybe the Vincennes and its sister ships can indeed do all those things. But what the Vincennes couldn’t do over the weekend was tell the difference between an Iranian air force F-14 and an Iranian airline Airbus A-300, and from that failure came tragedy.

Specialists in naval warfare have already provided some explanations for what could havegone wrong. Radar, we are told, cannot distinguish between a plane the size of the F-14 and a plane, like the Airbus, that is nearly three times as large; both show up as identical blips on the radar screen. Haze and distance are said to have prevented visual observation. According to the Pentagon, the Airbus was not emitting the standard code that would have identified it as a commercial airliner.

Italy says that one of its naval ships in the area confirmed through its own radar scans the U.S. account that the Airbus was flying at least four miles outside the corridor reserved for commercial traffic. The Italian ship also heard radio warnings from the Vincennes to the airliner. The unanswered question is whether the airliner heard them. In any event it did not change course. It kept coming toward the Vincennes, which had just been involved in a naval battle with Iranian gunboats and where sensitivity to danger was no doubt running high.

Many questions about this terrible event remain to be answered--a lot of them technical and some, if Congress does its investigatory job properly, political. The biggest and most overdue is what has been the point and what if anything has been gained by the Reagan Administration’s increasingly one-sided intervention in the Persian Gulf war, which has seen it militarily confronting Iran even as it ignores Iraq’s attacks on third-country ships and its indiscriminate use of poison gas on land. It was clear from the outset that an unneutral policy was an unwise policy, not least since such a tilt could only feed Iran’s darkest suspicions and encourage its most vengeful elements. The United States nonetheless chose to be overtly pro-Iraq. Against this background Iran is now able to allege that the shooting down of its airliner was deliberate, and to know that many in the world will believe that claim.