Who is to blame for death of 176 people in Ukraine plane crash: Iran, US, or fog of war?

WASHINGTON: Someone has the blood of 176 airline passengers on their hands. Whether it is President Trump or the Iranian leadership in Teheran cannot be established easily or acknowledged anytime. For now, it is expedient to blame it on a familiar culprit – the fog of war.


It is now almost certain that an

Iranian missile

brought down the Ukraine Airlines Boeing 737-800 shortly after take off from Teheran on Wednesday, killing everyone aboard. Most of the dead were Iranians (82) and Canadians (63) – many of them Canadian citizens of Iranian-origin heading back home via Kiev after vacationing in their turbulent but beckoning homeland.

They obviously had not factored in the sudden assassination of an Iranian general by the United States followed by a retaliatory missile attack by Iran against American assets. By most accounts, the civilian airplane was brought down mistakenly by an Iranian missile battery that was guarding against

American airstrikes

that Teheran was expecting in a retaliatory strike against its bombing of American bases in Iraq.

President Trump himself gave the first hint of what may have happened hours after US officials had first leaked the possibility that the downing of he Ukrainian Boeing was a grave mishap caused by an Iranian mishit. "It was flying in a pretty rough neighborhood. Somebody could have made a mistake. I have a feeling something terrible happened," Trump said, brushing aside any U.S responsibility for the incident.

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed it a little later, saying, "We have intelligence from multiple sources, including our allies and our own intelligence, the evidence indicates that the plane was shot down by an Iranian STA Missile." He then added that the strike "may have been unintentional."

Quite conspicuously, Trudeau declined to absolve Washington of blame when asked how much responsibility does United States bear for the tragedy.

“I think it is too soon to be drawing conclusions of assigning responsibility, whatever proportions. Right now, our focus is on supporting the families who are grieving across the country and provide what answers we can in a preliminary way, and recognizing that there is going to need to be a full and credible investigation into what exactly happened before we draw conclusions,” he responded.

Although both Trudeau and Trump gave the benefit of doubt to Iran with regards to motive, emphasizing that it may have been unintentional, trolls on social media strove to affix blame. As the gravity of the mishap became clear, many wanted to know why commercial planes were allowed to take off from Iran in the middle of a military operation, missile attacks & the possibility of US strikes. Others blamed Washington.

"If Trump had not ordered the killing of Soleimani, Iran wouldn't have responded, and there would have been no "fog of war" during which they could shoot down a plane full of innocent people," argued one person.

Iran, which claimed all too soon that the crash was the result of mechanical error and that the plane’s black box may have been “damaged,” continued to deny responsibility, calling reports of the missile being fired by its own military “psychological warfare” by the U.S

The incident also evoked terrible memories of a 1988 incident involving USS Vincennes, a guided-missile cruiser of the United States Navy, which shot down an Iran Air an Airbus A300 in the Gulf, killing all 290 people on board, after it mistook it for a F-14 Tomcat jet of the Iranian Air Force.

Canadians too were witness to an airline tragedy – one that involved India, from that era. Trudeau, who was flanked by his defense minister Harjit Singh Sajjan as he spoke about the tragedy in Iran, was only 14 in 1985 when Canada-based Khalistani terrorists blew up Air India Flight 182 as it flew from Montreal to London, killing 329 people.


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