US harassment of Iran airliner a distraction from crises at home: Analyst
Washington aims to use a recent provocative incident in which American fighter jets harassed an Iranian passenger plane to deflect the US public’s attention away from crises at home, says a political commentator.
On Thursday night, US warplanes operating illegally in Syria conducted aggressive maneuvers dangerously close to an Iranian Mahan Air flight over the Arab country’s al-Tanf region.
“American warplanes have absolutely no reason or right to harass a civilian airliner flying at 34,000 feet, between Tehran and Beirut on a regularly-scheduled flight, one that's been used any number of times without harassment by American warplanes,” Michael Springmann, a Washington-based author and former US diplomat in Saudi Arabia, told Press TV on Saturday.
“The whole affair is more of [President] Donald Trump's harassment and the maximum pressure to be placed on Iran. The explanations that the Americans give simply don't hold water,” he noted. “This is nonsense that the Americans are spewing out to claim that it's the Iranians’ fault. They're making it all up.”
The Washington-based analyst went on to say that, “It's basically simple harassment and far too close to the Aegis guided-missile cruiser Vincent that shot down an Iranian airliner, some years back, killing some 290 people including women and children.”
The Thursday incident has offered a grim echo of the shootdown by American forces of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, which resulted in the deaths of all the 290 people on board. Washington has never apologized for the crime.
Pointing to widespread protests in the US and the government’s inability to restore order to cities such as Seattle and Portland, Springmann said, “The whole [harassment] thing is a misdirected effort to take away from the problems at home and focus Americans' attention and energy on made-up issues.”
The rallies, which initially broke out over African American George Floyd’s death in police custody late in May, have intensified in recent days amid a public outcry over Trump's planned "surge" of federal forces in major US cities to suppress the protests.
The Trump administration’s handling of both the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed nearly 150,000 people and infected over 4.2 million others, and the nationwide unrest, has threatened to derail the president’s reelection campaign.
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