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It seems fairly certain that nobody on our side really wanted to shoot down a civilian airliner Sunday morning. Given the circumstances, the captain of the Vincennes apparently had no choice. In a combat zone, an aircraft was approaching, and it couldn't be warned off. It was his responsibility to protect his ship and his crew. He fired.
But the circumstances are troubling, because they represent a continuation of an established American method of getting into wars. For several generations, we have posted soldiers and sailors all over the world, and our citizens wander into combat zones. When they encounter trouble, real or contrived, then the American public rallies to support further military action.
Remember the Maine? The USS Maine was an American battleship docked in Havana. On Feb. 15, 1898, it exploded and sank. The story for public consumption was that the Maine had been attacked by the Spanish, who held Cuba then. Naturally, Americans enlisted to avenge this outrage.
However, the dastardly attack on the Maine
was
just so much hysteria. Recent research suggests that the
Maine sank itself. The coal in its bunkers gave off
explosive gases, which accumulated and then exploded.
But no one cared much about the truth then. The public easily believed that an American vessel had been attacked by foreigners. That's generally enough to start a war.
America entered another war a few years later, after Americans died when the Lusitania sank on May 7, 1915. The propaganda had it that the Lusitania was merely a passenger ship, carrying civilians. But in fact it was carrying munitions to Great Britain. The German embassy had taken out advertisements which warned Americans not to sail on that ship because it would be prey for the U-boats.
Facts didn't matter, though. This was the start of
another bout of hysteria, and eventually we got involved in
what was supposed to be the war to end all wars.
No one cared about the truth in 1964, either. On Aug. 2, 3 and 4 of that year, two American destroyers were supposedly fired upon by the North Vietnamese when the ships were in international waters, the Gulf of Tonkin.
Of course nobody fires at one of our ships and gets away with it. Almost unanimously, Congress passed a resolution that got us deep into the ongoing war in Vietnam. So 47,321 American soldiers died in the effort to teach the Vietnamese not to shoot at our ships, which they most probably hadn't done in the first place.
The pattern seems evident. Start with an incident involving the loss of American lives, or an alleged attack on an American vessel. Then our leaders tell all manner of lies. We get angry at the purported enemy, and we find ourselves in war which was started by something that really didn't happen.
The Maine was not sunk by the Spanish. The Germans did not attack an innocent passenger ship; they attacked a vessel that was carrying munitions to an enemy, and that was after warning Americans not to board that ship. The attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin very likely never happened, and it's certain that our ships weren't hit.
Now we have it that Iranian gunboats fired at an
American helicopter from the Vincennes. More fighting
followed, and then the airliner was shot down. Perhaps
we'll hear the whole story in 20 years, after some
protracted and divisive police action
or
conflict.
And one must grant that it is not beyond
possibility that we're hearing the truth now.
But even that is disturbing. We're spending billions on the Strategic Defense Initiative, which is supposed to be able to identify hostile missiles from outer space, and then shoot them down.
The Vincennes had state-of-the-art equipment, and it was only nine miles from the approaching craft. Even so, its radar and computers were unable to tell a civilian airliner from an F-14 fighter jet.
If there is that much difficulty with identification at that close range, how much more difficulty would there be from several thousand miles? How much chance that innocent people would be accidentally killed? Would we end up in a war because our electronic sensors and our computer programs failed to recognize the real situation?
We had enough problems when it was just our politicians that didn't tell the truth.
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