For Compassion--and Honor

Even before a team of Pentagon investigators had arrived in the Persian Gulf to try to sort out the facts behind the U.S. destruction of an Iranian airliner, President Reagan was blandly advising Congress that “we regard this incident as closed.� Of course the incident is not closed, nor can it be until a scrupulous weighing of all the retrievable evidence provides fuller and clearer answers to the many compelling questions that this tragedy has raised. The team of experts assigned to determine how the missile cruiser Vincennes came to shoot down an Iran airline Airbus with the loss of 290 lives has been given 15 days to make its report. Until that study is in hand, the President and his subordinates should have the good sense to avoid half-baked prejudgments.

So far the only thing that seems certain about last Sunday’s terrible event is that it sprang from the mistaken belief of the Vincennes’ captain that the aircraft that radar showed approaching his ship was a warplane bent on possibly hostile action, not a commercial airliner that may have strayed off course. One of the tasks of the official inquiry will be to establish the reasons for that belief. From that could come the means for fairly assessing how much of the responsibility for what followed can be attributed to the pilot of the Airbus and, possibly, to Iran’s civil aviation authority, and how much to the Vincennes and its captain and other officers.

Fixing responsibility is important, in this case not so much to determine legal accountability as to try to reconstruct how the sequence of events that brought on the tragedy developed. Out of that could come new guidelines and maybe even new rules of engagement aimed at preventing a recurrence of Sunday’s incident.

But if responsibility is important, then surely compassion and national honor are no less so, and here it is both possible and desirable for the United States to do the right things quickly, without waiting for the results of a formal inquiry.

The Iranian Airbus was shot down by mistake, but when all is said and done that mistake snuffed out the lives of nearly 300 innocent people. Certainly the United States should promptly show its pity and its magnanimity by offering adequate compensation to the survivors of those who were killed. Certainly, too, it should be prepared to go beyond the coldly correct protocol of stating its “regrets� for what happened with a warmer expression of its sorrow and sympathy. Those who died when the Airbus was blown from the sky were not this country’s enemies. They were innocent victims of an appalling error, and decency requires that what they suffered should be officially acknowledged.