What sort of mistake was the shootdown of Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752?
Iran finally admits what everyone already knew: that it shot down Flight 752. Iran says it was due to “human error.” And predictably, Iran also takes some talking points from the western left and accuses Trump of being the real cause.
Clearly, the Iranians meant to shoot down something. So they were not altogether incompetent; they were aiming at something, and the something was this plane, and their aim was true. They claim they didn’t know it was a passenger plane that had just taken off from their own major airport loaded with Iranians and Canadian-Iranians. That was their mistake.
But some people find this “we didn’t know it was a passenger plane” to be an explanation impossible to believe, or at least highly unlikely to be true.
The Iranian leaders are certainly capable of such a cold-blooded murder. They also are fully capable of lying about it.
The lies we know they did tell initially were brazen and ridiculous – and stupid, because they were not believable. First they loudly claimed the cause was technical malfunction, when it was too early to have known that and when they should have realized other nations would have access to data that would easily disprove it. The real cause could not be hidden for long, but lying was the first (and utterly familiar) refuge of these scoundrels.
Then they told the lie that anyone who said they were to blame was lying. Then they claimed they wouldn’t give up the black boxes or cooperate with Boeing examiners in any investigation. That would be a violation of the usual protocol followed in such studies and also would make it much harder to figure out what had happened if it had been a real crash. So those denials were also “tells” that indicated extreme duplicity. And then the Iranians doubled down on those lies even when pretty much the whole world was saying “We know otherwise.”
They’re incompetent liars, in addition to everything else.
So it makes a certain amount of sense that there are people who think they’re still lying now and that they very much intended to shoot this plane down (or a different passenger plane; this one had left somewhat later than originally scheduled), and that it would be payback for the Vincennes incident of 1988, in which Iran’s Flight 655 was erroneously felled by a missile fired from a US ship. After all, there was this earlier tweet from Rouhani: “Those who refer to the number 52 should also remember the number 290. #IR655 Never threaten the Iranian nation.”
It certainly sounds as though it might be a threat connected with shooting down a passenger plane. But why shoot down a Ukrainian plane with Iranians and Canadian-Iranians on it? Why not perpetrate something like Lockerbie, where at least the Iranians would be getting revenge on Americans? Surely these experts in terrorism and bombing could figure out how to do that? As for a case of mistaken identity with some other passenger plane, there were no American flights to Iran; American commercial planes don’t go there and they weren’t flying over air space there. So this action makes no sense in terms of revenge.
Other people have theorized that there was someone on the plane the Iranians wanted to kill. But if so, this was a terribly inefficient and downright embarrassing way to do it. The Iranians don’t lack for more pointed ways to kill people and shooting down a plane with 176 people (mostly Iranian or Canadians of Iranian ethnicity) on it just doesn’t make sense if the goal is to kill one person or even a couple of people. And who was this person or these people Iran was trying to kill? Internet speculation about their possible identity has been unconvincing so far.
And then there’s the problem Iran has been having with its protestors. An action like this – shooting down a plane loaded with Iranian civilians – would be likely to inflame the crowds and increase their numbers. Is that really what the mullahs were eager to do? Somehow I doubt it. It makes it unlikely that the leaders of Iran would intentionally choose to do this. And in fact, more and larger protests have indeed occurred.
My sense at this point is that the Iranian authorities are now – like that proverbial stopped clock – caught in a brief and rare moment of telling the truth. Not the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but the truth that they were incompetent and didn’t mean to shoot down a passenger plane loaded with 176 people.
However, I would never be surprised if more evidence emerges later that shows it was purposeful and the plane was targeted for some reason, because the Iranian leaders are certainly capable of an action such as that if it suits their goals. I just don’t think it was the case this time.
They were too scared to kill Americans but they needed to kill somebody to show that they would and could
Doodad:
If so, they wouldn’t have claimed mechanical failure over and over. And then they wouldn’t have said it was a mistake.
Looks from the outside as an instance of a staffing and training mistake, or rather, a series of these sorts. Wrong people in the wrong systems with wrong training: kablooey, error error error, disaster. That sort.
The why is the part that is so confounding.
They are either laughably incompetent or they just randomly shot down an object for a reason that defies explanation.
I’m leaning towards incompetence because that is almost always a safer bet.
Given its not golf, no mulligan, but maybe an oopsie?
@doranimated, Twitter: “Why did Khamenei admit to downing the plane? The evidence was too great to hide. Ukrainian investigators found shrapnel from a Russian air-to-ground missile in debris from beneath the cockpit. Which also explains why the pilot issued no distress signal: he was the first to die.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1216084017566683137
I can’t find the link, but the article I read yesterday sure sounded like someone in Iran was trying to put the blame on the IRGC specifically. I wonder if there’s behind-the-scenes struggles going on like between the KGB and Red Army after Stalin died.
I am with Neo. Iran admitting that it shot down the plane–even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they did–just doesn’t make sense. They consistently and shamelessly tell all sorts of obvious lies. Why the truth this once?
The only plausible theory I have seen elsewhere is that international airlines refused to fly into Iran unless Iran fessed up. Possible. It would at least explain how pressure could be exerted on them to tell the truth.
I am not at all a conspiracy theorist, but the only other explanation I could think of is that Iran did deliberately shoot down this plane with the intent that the incident would be blamed on the US’s firing back at Iran after the attack in Iraq. But then the US didn’t fire back and the Iranians were stuck. This explanation is consistent with why they might shoot a plane full of Iranians and Canadian/Iranians.
The demonstrators seem mostly to be young students much like many of the passengers on that plane. I wonder if the demonstrators know something we don’t?
I heard that the commander of the air defense unit in Syria which didn’t shoot down the Israelis was executed. Failure to act might have looked worse than acting wrongly, but I think the person/people who did this are doomed.
Street protests in Iran were shut down recently at considerable loss of life. With Soleimani gone, who’s in charge of the Revolutionary Guard? Is he really in charge?
By the by, a video (from a short distance) of the launch of an air defense ground-to-air missile has surfaced. The guy who took it wasn’t releasing it earlier for fear of the Iranian security services’ disapproval.
Doodad has it, IMO (2:39 pm). I think that’s what this has been about all the time. It had to be done in the same window of time as their “official” attack on us, for this calculation to work (the pretenses of non-murder). But they know that, in the end, the world will remember that 176 were killed in the Iranian response. They count on the big facts being retained by those who matter. Same way they never had to take official responsibility for the Lockerbie downing — until this past weekend, when they did. Such long memories, these events are all like yesterday to the Islamists/Islamics.
Neo, I understand your objections to that logic but it is hard to parse every last bit of Iranian deviltry. They wanted to kill; they told us how they would; and then guess what, it happened. Who was on that plane they never bothered to know or care. That’s how it reads to me.
sdferr sums up: “Looks from the outside as an instance of a staffing and training mistake, or rather, a series of these sorts. Wrong people in the wrong systems with wrong training: kablooey, error error error, disaster. That sort.”
This is the ‘likely’ true & correct response (ie, it’s the full-credit answer on the Test) … like, if you flip the switch and the light doesn’t come on, replace the bulb and try again. True, theoretically other possibilities do exist, to explain why your light didn’t come on … but those aren’t the correct response.
Modern military capability requires a System, within which everybody & everything operates. Building on that, yeah, is staffing, education, training, rinse, repeat, review.
Russia can sell say a Tor anti-missile system to Iran, train a few crews … but just like selling some planes and training some pilots does not an Air Force make … my guess is yeah-huh, Tehran barely had any business even uncrating the hardware, and ‘this’ is the result of trying to use it … doesn’t much matter, ‘for what’.
But it is impossible to know unless or until someone spills, someday. Our General Milley says he thinks the Iranian missiles were very much intended to kill, and that it was our defenses that outperformed them. In that case, the logic of killing defenseless civilians (as a vicious alternative) loses something, although they still could have done both.
In 2004, an airplane carrying the governor of Kentucky was inbound to Washington National Airport. It had to penetrate the secure airspace that had been established in the aftermath of 9/11, but it was an approved flight and the FAA controllers had it on radar and were in radio contact with it.
Then the plane’s transponder failed. (This is a device that transmits aircraft identification along with altitude.) The controllers were not unduly concerned given that they had the plane on primary radar and knew who it was.
But the TSA coordination center, which was getting a *partial* feed of the air traffic radar, could not see the data tag associated with the radar blip and treated it as an unidentified target, even after calling air traffic control and being told that all aircraft were accounted for. Some combination of the TSA and the Capitol Police ordered immediate evacuation of the Capitol…”take off your shoes and run.” Two F-15s were ordered to intercept the plane, which landed without incident.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/us/series-of-failures-is-cited-in-evacuation-of-capitol.html
Because there’s nothing to gain. We see no expected net benefit.
What did the mullahs see? How did they think things would shake out? Who knows.
Maybe these events… the threats and the attack… are just loosely correlated. Hard to say. *Very* hard to say.
How bout the latest Iranian threat?
Sorry; *that’s* not the latest threat:
Rouhani Advisor Threatens Iranian Journalists Over Coverage Of Plane Crash
https://www.google.com/amp/s/en.radiofarda.com/amp/30369976.html
Threatening civilian expats… and their relatives!… in the media?
I can see no expected net benefit from this course of action so it’s probably nothing; and if any Farsi-speaking journalists are subsequently taken hostage or killed its probably just a coincidence.
Mentus:
On the contrary – I see plenty of net benefit to the threat to journalists of Iranian origin who speak out against the current leadership of Iran. I think it’s obvious they want them to stop doing it.
The only effect of the shootdown of the plane is to discourage people from coming to Iran. I assume this hurts the Iranian economy.
Sec. Pompeo, Twitter: “The voice of the Iranian people is clear. They are fed up with the regime’s lies, corruption, ineptitude, and brutality of the IRGC under @khamenei_ir’s kleptocracy. We stand with the Iranian people who deserve a better future.”
(Video at link)
https://mobile.twitter.com/SecPompeo/status/1216064377444618240
Kai Akker says: “But it is impossible to know unless or until someone spills, someday.”
It’s possible they were trying to shoot down a drone, it’s possible that too many ex-Iranians in Canada & the US are vigorously assisting their new homelands (and even using visits ‘home’ to do so, in collaboration with family & friends who weren’t so lucky), or that someone ‘got to’ the missile batteries with a Stuxnet-like virus (and now partly share the blame!) … tons of hypotheticals always exist (and that’s why it’s a term-of-derision).
That Iran admitted it, is firstly because we knew, and our leaders spelled it right out for the world. We may very know a whole lot more about it … in fact, the most likely reason we said anything whatsoever, is that we DO know a lot more … and whether the rest of the world learns the fuller truth, is now up to Iran.
Reading some of the various theories for why they would do this on purpose just doesn’t hold up for me. Many assume knowledge of things by Iranians that they couldn’t possibly know at the time or venture into conspiracy theory land.
Also their actions don’t seem to fit with doing it on purpose. If purposely done I would think they could either boldly take credit and face wrath of many, they could go all in and blame Trump, or they could play dumb like they did (very poorly though) and just let it stand. The play dumb move is what they were doing until the about face today. Why the change is the real interesting question. They didn’t have to own up to it. Maybe financial is the reason but if I’m an airline I’m thinking twice about flying into that country if they may ‘unintentionally’ shoot down a plane.
Seems like incompetence mixed with zealotry leading to tragedy. But we’ll likely never know.
@doranimated: “Here’s the type of thing we’re not hearing from our media. This courageous Iraqi patriot is @ahmedsamed80, a reporter for Dijlah TV, an Iraqi cable station. He was assassinated today after airing this clip, almost certainly by Soleimani’s goons.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1215711450662080513
Thread at link, translation to English of Ahmed’s broadcast report. It’s worth the trouble to read: after all, his life was taken for having said these words and harbored these sentiments. His cameraman was also killed. Iraqis won’t quit.
In Basra, yesterday.
…too many ex-Iranians in Canada & the US are vigorously assisting their new homelands
Ah, but see this account: “The curse of Soleimani | In the aftermath of the downing of the Ukrainian plane, an Iranian newspaper revealed that an Iranian couple, Muhammad Saleh and his wife, who studied in Canada and who were on the plane, had been photographed with Qassem Soleimani. Why? Apparently, Mohammed was a computer science genius. He was planning after graduating from the University of Toronto to return to Iran, where a position in one of the Revolutionary Guards cyber units awaited him. The plane carried a number of Iranians attending Canadian universities. Mohammed reminds us of that special talent the US & Canada have for training up their adversaries, especially China & Iran, while giving them a chance to study our vulnerabilities from an intimate distance.”
See link for newspaper photo of Haj. Q with the doomed couple.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1215989545407254528
Also, a “high-level” Iranian-linked paramilitary leader was shot dead in Karbala, Iraq, today.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7876991/High-level-pro-Iran-militia-commander-Iraq-killed-unknown-gunmen.html
And, back in Tehran, the British ambassador was arrested (and then released) for taking photos of the street protests.
DJT, Twitter (1 hr ago): “To the brave, long-suffering people of Iran: I’ve stood with you since the beginning of my Presidency, and my Administration will continue to stand with you. We are following your protests closely, and are inspired by your courage.”
and 38 mins ago: “The government of Iran must allow human rights groups to monitor and report facts from the ground on the ongoing protests by the Iranian people. There can not be another massacre of peaceful protesters, nor an internet shutdown. The world is watching.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump
I see a gross benefit to threatening journalists… some may shut up for a while… but there are countervailing costs that make threatening the media with death a net liability, even if you don’t follow through.
The benefits are front-loaded and conspicuous. It’s easy to identify the marginal benefit of one journalist shutting up/quitting; but the negative effect on the remaining journalists’s disposition toward Iran is harder to measure.
Maybe this is why Iran shot down #PS752:
1) they made a threat and needed to follow through to be credible;
2) it was in their airspace and they couldn’t miss;
3) there were no Americans on board so no reciprocity/no escalation from US; and
4) the likely propaganda value to partisans in North America trying to remove Trump from office.
Maybe they just wildly miscalculated the probability of 3) & the ENB of 4).
Human error is of course possible. But once the plane went down, the Iranian leadership may have supposed that the nations whose citizens had been killed (including, in this case, Ukraine and Canada) would blame the US and Trump. After all, there are many voices in the US doing just that. How surprising for the Iranians to see themselves held accountable.
With Soleimani gone, who’s in charge of the Revolutionary Guard? Is he really in charge?
Apologies for the slow uptake.
Here he is: (@MPPregent) “Soleimani replacement picked to intimidate Iraqi protesters and Kurds – protesters across the Shia Crescent.
What is he known for?
Ismael Ghaani, carried out the execution of every military-aged-male in the Kurdish province of Sanandaj in 1981 – down to 10 year old boys.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/MPPregent/status/1214144984049471488
See link for photo, rest of thread.
I am interested by T. Migratorious’ suggestion (above at 3:58 PM) that the shooting down of the Ukrainian airliner might have been a deliberate act by the Iranians with the intention of blaming it on the Americans. It has a certain plausibility. Certainly the Iranian regime is ruthless enough to have done it. However, if that was the case, why did they not blame America for the disaster from the beginning? There are plenty of useful idiots in the MSM who would have bought into it. Look at the number of pundits claiming that the plane was shot down in a “crossfire” between Iran and the American military. In the end, I go back to Occam’s Razor and, unless and until other evidence appears, will conclude that it was simply a case of an air defense crew, on high alert and told to expect an America attack, seeing a blip on their screen, panicking and firing missiles.
Prof. Jacobson, at Legal Insurrection, thinks there’s more to it than mere operator incompetence:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/01/iran-still-hiding-something-about-airline-shootdown/
I commented elsewhere. I was the Combat Information Center Officer on one of our carriers. I know how confusing situations can get; and in a situation of increased stress, how really bad decisions can be made. I don’t know what the information technology in Iranian missile control centers is like; i.e., how clear a picture they have of the environment. Nor do I know the level of experience, or competence, of the person with shoot authority. But, I have no trouble believing that it was simply a monument screw up. USS Vincennes demonstrated how easily such things can happen.
I don’t know why the Iranians tried to lie. Of course, I don’t know why they do many of the things that they do. I guess they thought for the moment that they could get away with it; then realized that they couldn’t.
Kate, excellent pointer to Prof. Jacobson’s read at Legal Insurrection.
This new line of explanation by the Iranians is indeed akin to the young child with it’s hand mysteriously in the cookie jar.
They shouldn’t be making any stumble-bum statements like this. They should just shut up, until they work out a stable position to take. Somebody is rushing up to the microphone (presumably under duress) and blurting out ca-ca that only incriminates them further.
This is going to get more interesting before it settles down, and probably soon.
Oldflyer,
It’s good to get input from experienced military, especially line. I was enlisted on the Enterprise, when Saigon was evacuated to the Midway. Up until that day, I had … quite a reserved opinion about the investment in carriers. (Also the Constellation, and an FA sub, previously, all in tech-ratings.)
It’s true that training & experience doesn’t make us infallible, or immune to stress … but what I’m picking up from Tehran reports sounds like … something else.
Maybe it’s just me, but Occam’s Razor sayz they’re terrorists.
Screw all this I-only-killed-your-friends-because-the-sun-was-in-my-eyes-and-my-suit-didn’t-come-back-from-the-cleaners b.s.
It’s always a story with these mfers. Iran violates a norm, makes an excuse, and finds a sympathetic ear.
It could be that it was, as Oldflyer says can happen, an error in a confusing and frightening situation, and the Iranian authorities lied about it hoping they could blame someone else. It’s what they do.
Is we killed your friends out of a combination of carelessness and unconscious malice much better than we intentionally killed your friends out of pure malice?
We’re picking the flea shit out of the pepper. Those people are dead and Iran killed them.
Kate said “—-and the Iranian authorities lied about it hoping they could blame someone else. It’s what they do.”
Now I will fix it “—and the Dems and fellow travelers lie about it hoping they could blame Trump. It’s what they do.”
I tend to think it was mistake. Read that the Soviet system used has auto switch. Maybe it was turned on. Poor training.
I thought that the Vincennes shot down the airliner because the transponder was off.
Carrier guys – enlisted on the F D Roosevelt CVA 42. Did Med cruise in 1970.
There are a couple of assumptions that really can not be ignored when trying to get to the bottom of this incident:
1. What is the procedure for firing a TOR anti-aircraft missile? It’s clearly much more involved than just point and shoot; this is not a video game. An aircraft transponder gives off a unique identifier that is readily visible to a radar operator, and 6 other passenger airliners had taken off prior to this one, all after the Iraq-targeted missile barrage. They all took off from the same airport on the same flight path and nothing happened. What happened here? Step by step. I think this will reveal a purpose and not a mistake.
2. Why assume that the action was at the direction of the Iranian ruling regime? While they are automatically recognized as the accountable party for Iran’s actions, that’s a huge assumption given the state of matters today, in Iran. A rouge action doesn’t have to be as a result of an authorized instruction; there could be dissenting elements within the regime that are acting to disrupt.
It will be interesting to see what time unveils.
That occurred to me, but the immediate claim of mechanical failure doesn’t make sense in that context.
Iran has their fall guy already picked out. He is probably clairvoyant — do Persians have a form of the Japanese hara-kiri (seppuku) custom?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/11/iran-plane-crash-tehran-admits-unintentionally-shot-plane/
Did the plane actually make a turn?
If so, why?
Lynn Hargrove,
Good to hear from you, hope the FDR hit some good ports!
Mom routed pics back to me, found ‘lost’ pics of me on the boat, the Big E.
Like in my early reads, for sure these are complex systems, difficult really to avoid trouble if there isn’t good & ongoing training. Maybe that’s all it was … and if they just stand down now, then whatever can be a whatever…
The President tweeting in Farsi … they done been had by the fickle finger of fate!
Why must I remind readers after all this time that the Koran, the dictated words of Allah, scribed by Mohamed, PBUH, specifically authorizes lying to unbelievers in order to advance the Ummah! The ayatollahs are simply following Allah’s commands. We are being lied to.
I agree with Prof. Jacobson: there is an easy, quick distinction to be made between an ascending, slow airliner at takeoff from Tehran airport, versus a descending, speeding incoming hostile missile heading to Tehran. Even by a poorly trained Iranian.
Why these lies?
Why the rapid bulldozing of the crash fragments before any independent, even if only Ukrainian, inspection?
The whole story reeks of fabrication, of falsehoods. The easy way is to blame poor training, faulty switch settings, but that fails to address the facts.
I think the plane was shot out of the sky intentionally, though the nature of intent(s) may not yet be clear.
‘Tis best not to reach a verdict before hearing all the evidence!
The fact that the plane was a Boeing is significant. If Iran had persuaded the world that the crash was due to engine failure, then the company could have been held liable for damages. Given Boeing’s other problems, they were certainly an easy target in this regard, and for a couple of days a lot of the reporting focused on them.
AesopFan queries: “Did the plane actually make a turn?”
It turned after getting in trouble, trying to make it back to the airport. From media map-graphics I’ve seen they got turned 180, then crashed. That might be a mistake, and they only managed 90. To make a 180 looked pretty sharp, but this wasn’t exactly a nav-chart.
The guy’s statement is fairly incoherent … yeah, it looks like his hara-kiri address.
Does an airplane that has just taken off from an airport travel at the speed of a cruise missile (what Iran says they thought it was?) Nope.
Does anyone believe Iran is telling the truth? Maybe Democrats.
Ken:
Well, I’m not a Democrat, but as I already explained in this post I believe at this point they’re telling the truth, although far from the whole truth. To believe otherwise one must come up with an alternative explanation that makes sense, and so far none of them make sense.
People can make very stupid errors when poorly trained, frightened, and under great pressure.
AesopFan; Ted Clayton:
I’ve read conflicting reports on whether the plane actually made a turn. At this point, I don’t think it did. See this:
In this case, I’d trust the Ukrainians over the Iranians.
And then the Iranian commander – who sounds as though he wishes he were dead, and who probably will be dead soon, said this:
A huge mistake by poorly trained people seemed plausible at first. But this technical discussion changed my mind — as Aggie has pointed out, there are several steps that are required to use this thing to shoot down a plane:
https://www.asiatimes.com/2020/01/opinion/iran-keeps-concocting-fake-news-on-downed-jet/
That information makes it seem pretty unlikely that this was a mistake. I suppose it’s possible that the killing of Solemani was so unexpected that the chain of command was seriously broken. The new commander said something recently about how their units are oh-so empowered they can do whatever they want. In light of this shootdown and what we have learned so far, that sounds like a cover story meant to support the accidental shooting narrative.
I can see the Russians delivering crummy stripped-down air-defense systems to Iran, but it sounds like the fact that the missile hit the plane means that the radar was working, and that the plane had been targeted. Maybe they thought it was a different plane, but that is a difficult error, too….
As they say in Maine, “hard sayin’, not knowin’…”
Children playing with matches. And they want to have an atom bomb to play with.
At this point in time, I’m going to think that this shooting down was just a trigger happy commander/crew who didn’t have the training or equipment to determine that it was NOT a threat. He/they might have also been fearful of what would happen to them if it turned out to be a threat and they didn’t shoot it down. Would they have been imprisoned for not defending Iran properly?
So, yep, Neo, I think you are correct when you say: “People can make very stupid errors when poorly trained, frightened, and under great pressure.”
” Why not perpetrate something like Lockerbie, where at least the Iranians would be getting revenge on Americans? Surely these experts in terrorism and bombing could figure out how to do that?”
Well, we killed Soleimani, the brains behind that sort of thing.
I’m not convinced that there was a particular individual(s) on the plane someone wanted dead, I was (and am) only positing it.
The auto-kill switch sounds plausible except it didn’t target earlier flights.
The bulldozing (erasure) of the personal effects in the debris field is atrocious as an affront to the memory of the victims.
I’m still of the opinion the there is a power struggle in Iran.
The IRGC may have been too provocative for some elements in power.
Soleimani may have been delivered to us as part of that struggle.
There is an awful lot of conjecture in this post and the associated comments. For all we know the SA-15 missile system might have been on automatic, which it is capable of, while the crew had slipped out for some fresh goat milk. We simply do not know and might never know.
Do you think the shootdown of the Ukranian airliner was rehearsed with the shootdown of TWA flight 800? Just askin’
Old Russian (& I assume Soviet) joke; AA missile crews have pistols, not for self defernse, but for suicide,iIf an enemy gets through and missiles ( or all missiles) were not fired. In other words, when in doubt, “Shoot!”.
That launch might be the result of a failure to communicate the presence of “normal” civilian traffic, but there are other possibilities. The students had been exposed to the West and thus were dangerous to the state. The Iranian/Canadians were “traitors” who ran away from their homeland. In a certain sense, the passengers were not worth too much to the state. There probably were more Iranians killed during the last demonstrations. It was Trump’s fault! The Iranians probably didn’t expect the international out-cry and news coverage.
After all, the IRGC-Quds were apparently selected for loyalty and obedience not intelligence. Both air traffic control and air defense require some decent level of intelligence. That shoot-down probably didn’t need anything except a withheld phone call. A hyper excited missile commander did the rest. That person did his duty and would get time off until the next news cycle. Officially, “Oops.”
But the Iranian government must know that their guardians are nothing but murderers of civilians in Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, and that the great leaders could join “Mani” in the fire at any time. Boom!
New video (to me) of two! anti-air missiles — note video clock, 30 secs apart — and the flaming plane going down shortly thereafter (camera seems to be closed circuit at some industrial location): Heshmat Alavi, twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/HeshmatAlavi/status/1217112465013645313