When Bad Things Are Caused by Good Nations

The event defied precedent. The U.S. Navy blew 290 people out of the sky -- victims whose only offense was the understandable desire to fly from Iran to Dubai. Something had gone monstrously awry, yet Americans seemed to respond almost grudgingly: there were guilt-stricken voices, yes, but they were distressingly few, and there was almost no compelling sense of shame. What the nation offered in the face of inadvertent tragedy was dry, formulaic expressions of official regret, the diplomatic equivalent of preprinted condolence cards.

The captain of the Vincennes, Will Rogers III, came closest to genuine emotion when he began a written statement, "This is a burden that I will carry for the rest of my life . . ." He was unable, however, to end his sentence there. Like good people who cause bad things to happen, he felt the need to explain and justify rather than putting a period after his grief: "but under the circumstances . . . I took this action to defend my ship and my crew." The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe Jr., used a similar yes-but formulation in saying, "We deeply regret the loss of life here, but that commanding officer had a very heavy obligation to protect his ships, his people."

And what of Ronald Reagan, a President normally so lavish in his displays of heartfelt sentiment? On that somber Sunday, July 3, Reagan dispatched a formal five-paragraph note to Iran expressing "deep regret." The President told aides he considered this an apology that satisfied the nation's obligations, but his public comments were measured in the extreme. Reagan allowed that the shooting down of the Iranian airbus was a "great tragedy," but soon belittled even that cliched description by also calling it an "understandable accident."

Words may be small balm in the face of pictures showing lifeless children plucked from the Persian Gulf. But there is something disturbing when a great nation finds itself mute in the face of its own complicity in disaster. Corporations are not expected to show soul, yet immediately after the Bhopal disaster the chairman of Union Carbide took the risk of making a symbolic pilgrimage to India. Personal gestures of atonement are commonplace in other cultures: the president of Japan Air Lines resigned because 520 passengers perished in a 1985 plane crash.

America's tongue-tied denial may be rooted in the way the destruction of Flight 655 brutally conflicts with the nation's self-image. Americans do not see themselves as trigger-happy gunslingers; that black-hat role was played by the Soviet Union in 1983 when it brazenly shot down a Korean airliner. Terrorists are supposed to be the ones who cause death in the air -- not the nation upholding the civilized rights of free passage in the Persian Gulf.