Iran thought to have shot down Ukrainian 737 by mistake

Ruben's apparently the editor-in-chief of an NYC-based Albanian American newspaper. http://illyriapress.com/english/

 

Best of luck to him.

 

We cant win for losing. At least that scum general terrorist is dead. This is such a tragic incident committed by a shithole military. They have misspent their money.

 

Absolutely tragic. I'm going to hold off saying that this definitively is what happened but it does seem likely that Iran was on high alert and a missile crew made a horrible mistake. This is still very early in the investigation and hopefully we'll know more. At the minimum the family of those who died deserve to know what happened to their love ones and if Iran is smart in this they will come clean and if it was their military who did this hold those responsible.

 

This blaming of Trump will backfire big time.

There are plenty of other direct things to blame Trump for.

Don't give these professional victims something else to cry about.

 

If it's 100% proven that their own military shot down a commercial airliner, I don't know how they will get away with the international community by not coming clean. Take responsibility, put up a statement addressing the people affected by this tragedy, and fairly compensate for the lives lost.

 

Sure, but they should, if they ever care about getting sanctions lifted. No country can succeed in isolation, North Korea being the clearest example of a failed state.

 

Who is talking about legal blame? We just assassinated a military leader of another nation in a third country without permission.

The legal blame is largely irrelevant. I don’t think anyone is saying Iran is without blame.

What is being rightfully pointed out is that acts of war have have consequences, both seen and unforeseen. There are now nearly 200 innocent dead people as a result of the aftermath of decisions both the President and the leader of Iran made.

 

I understand what you are saying. I see this as too simple of a failure to not place 99% of the blame on the Iranian gov. Why didn’t they simply ground air flights when they enable their anti-missile air defense? It’s a major, sad, preventable screwup.

 

I think they planned in advance to shoot an airplane that belongs to a lightweight country in an attempt to blame Trump for that later, they were caught up off guard with no retaliation which wasn't within their calculation

 

this might be the thread for this essay even if not about the downing of the Ukranian airliner.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...-isnt-as-important-as-the-left-thinks/604642/

American Self-Criticism Borders on Narcissism
Many on the left forget that not everything in the Middle East is about the United States.

8:15 AM ET
Shadi Hamid
Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

Those who said there will be war may not have realized there already was war. This doesn’t mean killing Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was good. It almost certainly wasn’t. Iran quickly retaliated by targeting two American military bases in Iraq and may find new ways to escalate, but Iran had already been escalating. The regime of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, with its Iranian patrons, led by Soleimani, has been waging a brutal assault on Syrians for more than eight years. War, in short, has been happening—costing hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians their lives—since long before Donald Trump ordered the drone strike against Soleimani.

In the aftermath of the strike, critics of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, particularly on the left, have described the move as one more rash American intervention that’s sure to further destabilize the region. Yet this formulation gives U.S. policy, for all its flaws, too much credit. Not everything is America’s fault; others are sometimes to blame; and no one, not even the weaker parties, are devoid of agency or freed of responsibility. The burden of de-escalation does not fall entirely on the United States; Iran, too, can choose to de-escalate.

There is also the problem of Trump himself. Because killing Soleimani was very much his decision—reflecting the impulsiveness and disarray a decision by him implies—it seems fair to assume that one’s view of the president will affect how one interprets the fallout from Soleimani’s killing. Correcting for subconscious bias isn’t easy, but at the very least, observers should be aware of the Trump effect.

Middle East experts, and particularly those from the region, have tended to be less alarmist than most other commentators. These experts are likely to be less fixated on Trump himself and less likely to put the United States at the center of their analysis. And they are more likely to be aware of the sheer scale of brutality, mass murder, and sectarian cleansing that Soleimani helped orchestrate. Soleimani wasn’t just another bad guy. He was one of the region’s worst. (Yet another humanitarian catastrophe has been unfolding in Syria, but it has garnered little attention. The Assad regime, with crucial military support from Iran and Russia, has been bombing Idlib province. More than 200,000 Syrians have already fled, and hundreds of thousands more could be forced from their homes.

It is not an overstatement to say that Qassem Soleimani “haunted” the Arab world. As Kim Ghattas wrote here in The Atlantic, “Soleimani was so central to almost every regional event in the past two decades that even people who hate him can’t believe he could die.” It is a rich irony that as Democrats portrayed the strike as one of the worst foreign-policy blunders of the Trump presidency, a significant number of Syrians and Iraqis rejoiced—one of the very few times they have reacted positively to something, anything, that the United States has done. Their interests, of course, are not the same as Americans’, but there should at the very least be an effort to understand why they might have celebrated.

In trying to process and respond to Soleimani’s killing, the left finds itself in a bind, torn between two competing impulses. The first impulse combines an opposition to Western imperialism with a justified skepticism toward the use of U.S. military force. Human beings desire, or perhaps even need, moral clarity. Considering America’s destructive record in the Middle East, it is easy to assume that we are the problem, particularly when the resort to military action is buttressed by murky legal rationales. The second impulse is the left’s long-standing tradition of solidarity with the victims of repression and with populations rather than the regimes that subjugate them. In the unique context of Soleimani and the Iranian regime, this second concern comes into direct conflict with the first.

It’s impossible to resolve this tension, and the best one can hope for is that it be marshaled in the service of creative policy ideas. Still, too much of the analysis on the left seems to have erred on the side of anti-imperialist critique with insufficient attention to what Iran has actually been doing for years—at tremendous human cost to Syrians and to other civilian populations in the region. It is understandably difficult to view the Iranian regime as an aggressor when it has found itself in the sights of the world’s most powerful country, which has unparalleled military projection and the largest military budget of any state in human history.
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conclusion

America’s story in the Middle East is a tragic one, animated by a series of “original” sins. One can start history at the 2003 Iraq War, or one can begin earlier, with the first Bush administration encouraging Shias and Kurds to rise up en masse against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War in 1991, only to turn its back on them as they marched toward Baghdad. Saddam remained in power, and as many as 100,000 Iraqis fell victim to reprisal killings, many of which “were committed in proximity to American troops, who were under orders not to intervene.”

Or one can look still further into the past. In Iran from the 1950s through the ’70s, the United States supported the brutal repression of dissenters by the shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. He was “our S.O.B.,” to borrow Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous description of a different American-backed authoritarian. But before that, in 1953, Americans helped organize the overthrow of the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, which facilitated the conditions for the shah’s bid for absolute control; the shah’s excesses, in turn, are what made the Iranian revolution possible.

Even good things, like the notion that the United States should back dictatorships less and promote democracy more, have been tainted in the eyes of the left (and, for that matter, the right) by the second Bush administration’s rhetorical embrace of democracy promotion and the “freedom agenda.” But this is where U.S.-centrism becomes a blind spot. Not everything is about us. And not everything is primarily a question of whether the United States is using military force. Not every new crisis is about repeating the blunders of the Iraq War. Syria most certainly isn’t, and wasn’t, Iraq, and thinking that it is had a distorting effect on the Obama’s administration’s policy, with tragic consequences.

The United States has done terrible things in the Middle East. To even casual observers of the region, this should be clear enough. That, however, doesn’t mean there is a moral equivalence between Iran and the United States. Elevating America as a somehow unique source of evil takes necessary self-criticism and turns it into narcissism. It insists on making us the exceptional ones, glorifying ourselves by glorifying our sins. To suggest that American officials are at the rarefied level of the deliberate, systematic mass murder and sectarian cleansing that Soleimani helped orchestrate isn’t just wrong; it’s silly.

Despite the blood on his hands, 1 million or more Iranians publicly mourned Soleimani’s death. Some commentators took this as evidence that Iranians, despite their differences, were uniting in solidarity with their slain hero. Already, it appeared, the United States was losing. The large crowd sizes were an odd thing for critics of the Trump administration to highlight, though; in the absence of additional context, the mass mourning of a ruthless killer could only have the effect of making the Iranian people look bad. But demonstrations, particularly in a dictatorship, aren’t exactly an accurate bellwether of public sentiment (that’s what elections are for). Iran has a population of more than 80 million. That about 1 million were protesting tells us that some people revered Soleimani or at least felt some instinctual nationalist attachment to him, but it doesn’t tell us much more than that.

To focus on the perceived victims of American might and aggression—and many ordinary Iranians no doubt have suffered from punishing sanctions—runs the risk of imputing moral superiority to the mere act of resistance to the United States. But suffering, or to resisting, is not quite the same as being right. The Iranian regime, and Soleimani first and foremost, have long demonstrated that the weaker party does, in fact, have agency and that the powerless can use their power to destructive effect.

Shadi Hamid is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World, and a co-editor of the new book Rethinking Political Islam.
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Very possible.

 

Nook, while I respect the point you're making, it seems to me that there are a not-insignificant number of people going way too far in their "assigning of blame" for the airliner being shot down.

Just one example:

 

Harden. Omg.

 

Harden CERTAINLY isn't responsible for downing the Ukranian airliner. SO QUIT BLAMING HARDEN

 

Go back and read my posts in this thread. I put blame on both the President and the Iranian leaders. I pointed out a fact, that there are always casualties in a military action and there are always consequences seen and unseen. This is no different. Nearly 200 innocent people died.

It isn’t the unique to President Trump. I saw the same thing and made the same arguments when President Obama decided to use drones to kill a US citizen without due process.

We can not control what Iran does or doesn’t do. We can however take into account that there will likely be unforeseen casualties and long term effects based on the decision to intervene militarily, especially in the manner in which we did.

The death of innocent civilians as a result of the use of drones was/is partially on Obama’s hands and the death of those shot down is partially on Trump’s hands.

 

I don’t know who this person and take your that on social media that a lot of people are placing blame squarely on the President.

I think that is a mistake, the President didn’t know the plane would be shot out of the sky. What is fair is pointing out that there are always costs and consequences for military action and collateral damage has thus far been nearly 200 people.

The decision on when to intervene and when not to isn’t easy.