Reid opened AM Joy this morning with perspective on Iran’s acknowledgment it had mistakenly shot down, with Russian-made missiles, a Ukrainian airplane that took off from Teheran this week. The tragedy, Reid noted, was not just a personal horror for the families of the victims, it was also “a fresh hit to Ukraine” from Russia, and “deeply ironic for Iran.” The irony she referred to was the 1988 accidental downing of an Iran Air plane by the U.S.
That accidental shootdown also had roots in American adventurism, Reid explained. It came toward the end of the Iran- Iraq war, which began when Iraq invaded Iran, shortly after Iran overthrew its American-installed shah. Whom did we support in that war? Why, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. “We kept supporting him until we didn't - and then we overthrew him in Regime Change 2003,” Reid dryly noted. “War, irony, it just never seems to end.”
Now, Donald Trump has begun “a senseless new round of military adventurism,” as Reid put it.
And let’s just be blunt: Trump's decision to kill a senior Iranian military leader is the reason Iran was on a war footing near its civilian airport. And while Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani stepped up and rightly accepted that country’s fault for the horrible tragedy, Iranian officials also noted that the accident was the result of a human error caused by U.S. adventurism. In other words, that it was ultimately Donald Trump's actions that led to the tragedy that killed those 176 people.
And no, Donald Trump, we do not believe your rationale for starting all of this. You've given us no reason to believe you over the last three years and we just don't, although the dubiousness of the evidence hasn’t stopped this country from going to war before.
Reid didn’t ask but these latest events beg the question: How much more of this are we and others around the world going to tolerate?
