Keeping our eyes wide open

Guardian:

Iran’s foreign minister said on Saturday “there will be no war” with the US, since “nobody in the region is suffering from a hallucination to think that he is able to confront Iran”.

Nonetheless, US diplomats warned commercial airliners flying over the Persian Gulf that they faced a risk of being “misidentified” amid heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran.…

The order relayed on Saturday by US diplomats in Kuwait and the UAE came from an FAA Notice to Airmen published late on Thursday. It said all commercial aircraft flying over the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman needed to be aware of “heightened military activities and increased political tension”.

This presents “an increasing inadvertent risk to US civil aviation operations due to the potential for miscalculation or misidentification”, the warning said.…

The warning appeared rooted in what happened 30 years ago after Operation Praying Mantis, a daylong naval battle in the Persian Gulf between US forces and Iran during the country’s long war with Iraq.

On 3 July 1988, the USS Vincennes chased Iranian speedboats, which allegedly opened fire on a helicopter, into Iranian territorial waters. The US ship then mistook an Iran Air plane heading to Dubai for an Iranian F-14. The Vincennes fired two missiles, killing all 290 people onboard the flight.