San Marcos, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – A morose anniversary passed this month for Iranians, as it has been more than thirty-five years since July 3, 1988, when the U.S. warship Vincennes downed an Iranian civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, with 290 passengers, leaving Bandar Abbas for Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The Vincennes misidentified the Airbus as a military aircraft and shot it down, killing all 290 on board.
Then Iran was fighting an eight year war with Iraq, the longest conventional war in the 20th century. The US intervention in the Gulf by 1988 and the downing of the airliner forced Ayatollah Khomeini to accept a ceasefire. In June 2025, Iran fought a 12-day war with Israel, one of the shortest, and it was also US intervention that forced Ayatollah Khamenei to accept a ceasefire.
An examination of the July 1988 tragedy demonstrates that US and Iran have been locked in a war that has never been officially declared between the two states, a war-all-in-but-name. Such incidents are not just history for Iranian policy makers and population, but informs why there is skepticism that peace can ever really be achieved with America, never mind a fickle Trump administration.
The Tanker War of the Eighties
When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, it started an eight-year war. Iraq was also responsible for initiating the “tanker war” in 1984, when its air force attacked oil tankers bound for Iranian ports, leading to Iranian retaliation.
This tanker war continued for years, internationalizing the conflict, bringing in the US Navy. This US decision was hastened on May 17, 1987 when an Iraqi plane accidentally struck the American frigate “The Stark,” killing thirty-seven crew members.
Ironically, the US refocused attention away from Iraq and on Iran, arguing the Islamic Republic was responsible as it had failed to agree to negotiate an end to the war.
The US agreed to provide naval protection to Kuwaiti oil tankers by having them hoist an American flag. Soon violence escalated. American-reflagged ships were targeted, and the US retaliated by striking Iranian offshore platforms and speedboats used by the Revolutionary Guards, and sinking two Iranian frigates, eliminating half of Iran’s navy.
Amid these hostilities on 3 July 1988 a civilian Airbus which left Bandar Abbas for Dubai was shot down by the Vincennes.
How this incident occurred during the fog of war is the subject of intense debate. From the Iranian perspective this attack convinced them they were in a de facto war with the US, lashing out in a form of vicarious vengeance in response to the 444-day hostage crisis that began in 1979.
Ultimately, it was the downing of its airliner that brought Iran to accept a cease-fire that ended the Iran-Iraq War. While Iran’s conflict with Iraq ended, its war with the US did not.
The Ground War of the 2000s
If the episode of this “war” in the eighties was fought by naval vessels in the Gulf, the second phase was a proxy war fought on the ground.
After 2001, Bush had included the Islamic Republic in an “axis of evil,” which included Iraq and North Korea. In March 2003 the US was on Iran’s border after having just successfully invaded Iraq, a member of that “axis.”
Just as Trump toyed with the idea of regime change during the last month, Teheran feared that the Bush administration sought regime change after 2003 and feared the US or Israel would bomb its nuclear facilities back then.
One tool at Iran’s disposal was its support of a variety of Iraqi insurgents to target American forces. One of its Iraqi proxies, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, formed in 2006, targeted US military vehicles, with improvised explosive devices, challenging American control of the motorways.
This low intensity conflict winded down as American forces left Iraq in 2011 and the Obama administration entered a de-facto alliance with Islamic Republic to combat ISIS, with the US providing air cover, while Iran fought alongside Iraqi Shi’a militias on the ground.
The Air War over Iraq in the 2020s
Even before ISIS was defeated, in October 2017 Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and re-imposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Tehran retaliated by targeting US forces in Iraq, ushering in an air war, in the sense that rockets were fired at American targets in Iraq, by Kataib Hizballah, a militia allied with Iran, and the US would retaliate with air strikes.
A spiral of violence began on 27 December 2019 when the militia attacked the al-Taji base, an Iraqi military facility housing U.S. forces, killing an American contractor.
Two days later, the US responded with an air raid on several targets related to the Iraqi militia, which resulted in the death of at least 25 of its members.
On December 31, the US embassy in Baghdad ’s Green Zone was stormed by Iraqi demonstrators affiliated with the militia.
Trump, reeling from imagery that was reminiscent of the 1979 hostage crisis lashed out on 3 January 2020, ordering a drone strike that killed General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, as well as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, leader of the militia, in the vicinity of Baghdad’s airport.
While Trump used drones to target Soleimani in this air war, Iran retaliated by launching 22 Fateh ballistic missiles at two Iraqi bases housing American forces on January 8. The recent Iranian military strike against the al-Udeid Airbase in Qatar, housing US forces, was a similar orchestrated repeat of the 2020 missile strikes.
In the aftermath of the January 8, 2020 missile strike, Iran’s military accidentally shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 outside of Tehran, assuming the US was retaliating for its missile strike. In a tragic repeat of the Vincennes incident, Iran’s air defense force fired a missile resulting in the death of 176 passengers, primarily Iranian civilians.
“Lion v. Eagle,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / ChatGPT, 2025
For Iranians, the circumstances that led to the downing of its airliner in 1988 resonate with the present, whether it was direct military action in June 2025, Trump ordering the assassination of Soleimani in the beginning of January 2020, or economic warfare, such as Trump’s re-imposing sanctions on Iran, even during its crisis as the Middle East’s epicenter of Covid-19.
The Iran deal of 2015 was the first attempt to end this conflict that began in the 80s between the two nations. Trump’s obsession with negating the policies of his predecessor Barack Obama and his diplomatic triumph, the Iran deal. But the recent escalation between the US and Iran was also the legacy of the Biden administration, who had the chance of de-escalating this long war between Iran and the US after winning the elections in November 2020.
The American deployment to the Gulf in the eighties was based on a flimsy pretext, almost an excuse to seek out a war with Iran. The plan then was to bait Iran into a conflict, a repeat of the flimsy context that Iran was just weeks away from a nuclear weapon in 2025 that Israel used to launch its 12-Day War against Iran.
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