Kayhan Int’l Political Desk

     If Americans celebrate July 4 as Day of Declaration of Independence from Britain, July 3 is commemorated by Iranians every year as the Day of Eternal Shame for the US Administration.

     The current crook in the White House, Donald Trump, might be gloating over his breach of the 7-nation international accord on Iran’s peaceful nuclear project by withdrawing the US from the JCPOA and subjecting the Islamic Republic to a new set of economic sanctions.

     His crime is nothing new. It is the latest in the 65-year long criminal record of the US against Iran, beginning with the coup in 1953 that ousted the government of Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq and restored to power the fugitive British-installed Shah.

     Although all American crimes are unpardonable, and will remain so long after the United States of America ceases to exist on the map of the world, perhaps the most unmanly one was the July 3 shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in 1988 – a blatant act of state terrorism meant to encourage Saddam to continue his war crimes against the Iranian nation.

     It is now 30 years since the cowardly Captain Will Rogers, on orders from the rascal in Washington, Ronald Reagan, fired two missiles at the regular four-days-a-week Iran Air Flight 655 from Bandar Abbas to Dubai, around 10 AM local time, as it was ascending its designated Commercial Corridor 59.
 
      No amount of apologies – although Washington has offered none nor Tehran expects any – will ever wipe out the bitter memories of this dastardly deed that sent 300 innocent passengers and crew, including 57 women and 53 children, aboard the Airbus to a watery grave in the Persian Gulf off the coast of Iran’s Hengam Island (Iranian territorial waters into which the Vincennes had sneaked in violation of international laws).

      Today on the 30th anniversary of this crime, committed to prevent a resounding Iranian victory in the face of chemical bombardment and all other violation of international norms in the war that Washington had imposed on the Islamic Republic through its surrogate Saddam, the question being asked is: Has the US has succeeded in its goals?

     The answer is a big NO.

     As a matter of fact the arrogantly ignorant Americans have been miserably enmeshed in their own trap, with the curse of the martyrs of Flight 655 all set to haunt them to their impending waterloo – into which Trump is about to fall.

     True, Iran has offered great sacrifices since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and may have yet more price to pay as it successfully scales the peaks of progress to master nuclear, space, medical and other sophisticated technologies, as part of the resolve to safeguard Islamic values and national independence, and to spread the message of peace, justice and regional solidarity against foreign hegemony.

      But a review of the blind US hostility towards the dynamic developments in Islamic Iran shows frustration writ large on the US face despite its intrusions into the Persian Gulf, its occupation of Afghanistan, its illegal military presence in Syria, its assistance to the Saudi-Emirati invasion of Yemen, its massive support to the illegal Zionist entity and its feverish manipulation of the UN, especially the Security Council.

     The result is all too obvious and not at all in the favour of Uncle Sam, whether in the region or at international forums.

     The 8-year war and its untold atrocities topped by the downing of the Iranian passenger plane were intended to undermine the Islamic Republic System and check the impact of the Islamic Revolution on the Muslims of Iraq and beyond, have badly backfired.

     Washington has been forced to hastily hang its head in shame despite the threats and theatrics of Trump. It has eaten the humble pie in Iraq, where the people are profoundly influenced by the values that Iran espouses, as is evident by the emerging coalition government.

    In Lebanon, the people have again rallied behind the legendry anti-terrorist movement, the Hezbollah, in the parliamentary elections, to enable formation of a broad-based government.

      Among the Palestinians, the US has lost all credibility by shifting its embassy to the occupied Islamic city of Bayt al-Moqaddas, while freedom movements such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, inspired by the Islamic spirit of the Iranians are setting the stage for the popular struggle that could eventually end the illegal existence of the Zionist entity.

      Today, thirty years after the terrorist downing of Iran Air Flight 655, the voice of the Islamic Republic, which Washington so criminally sought to stifle, not only rings out loudly in the lands of the Arabs, the Turks, the Africans, the Balkans of Europe, and the South, East and Central Asians, but reverberates in Latin America as a reminder of the transient nature of the USA, which with its trampling of the most basic humanitarian values, including Trump’s forced separation of crying children from the laps of their aggrieved parents, stands today as the symbol of Satanism even for its traditional allies, the Europeans and the North American Christians yearning for freedom from the Jewish yoke.