As Aristotle said, we must explain the phenomena using the simplest possible hypothesis. When people have been sanctioned since 1979, almost 200 times against government entities, their treasury, financiers, banking institutions, technical facilities and their facilitators and transportation companies, by the United States – in cooperation with several members of the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada – mostly for lame excuses, then you need no explanations beyond this to cast light on Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s helicopter disaster.
It was reported that the Bell 412 helicopter that crashed near Varzaqan, Iran, while traveling from the Khoda Afarin Dam to Tabriz, killing Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, other officials and three crew members, had not been serviced for the last 30 years. It was a four-blade utility helicopter manufactured by Bell Helicopter in 1994; it was flying in bad weather conditions and heavy fog.
The Iranian president was part of the authority that decided not to escalate the Israeli provocation to spread its war on Gaza to the region. On April 1, conducting an airstrike on the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus, Syria, destroying the building housing its consular section, Israel killed 16 people, including eight officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and two Syrian civilians. Iran had the right to retaliate against this barbarous attack that spilled into open the war between the two countries, long fought through proxies, assassinations and strikes.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei publicly stated that Israel must be punished. However, Raisi, a veteran conservative politician and a Muslim jurist, worked hard, reportedly through intermediates with Washington, on how to uphold the right to strike but to avoid walking into the Israeli trap of spreading the war. Raisi’s response clearly sent Israeli leadership a clear cease-and-desist message, keeping the reciprocity as harmless to the civilians as possible. Iran sent a long-range ballistic missile, for the first time in history, from Iran to Israel.
We have to dismiss all the speculation asserted without evidence. Neither the U.S. nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "the Butcher of Gaza," needed to teach Iran yet another lesson by killing its president. It would not be a lesson but an open invitation to a war that would engulf the entire region, including those nations that had already elected to normalize their relations with Israel. Despite U.S. President Joe Biden and Netanyahu’s recent theatrical squabble about the arsenal, the war Cabinet in Israel would not dare to set ablaze the Middle East just six months before the U.S. presidential elections.
Since the renewal of the sanctions in 1995, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton “found the actions and policies of Iran constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the U.S.” By prohibiting transactions with respect to the Iranian oil resources, the U.S. denied the Iranian people the option to buy and sell merchandise or producing, contracting services and retrieving necessary spare parts for not only president’s but health and human services’ helicopters, too. Raisi’s crash is the sixth fatal helicopter accident in this month.
Some of the U.S. sanctions on Iran could be defended as forcing the mullahs’ regime to observe human rights, as the one recently imposed after Mahsa “Zhina” Amini’s death, but most of those 99 most recent sanctions were declared on flimsy arguments and excuses that are weak and difficult to believe; they actually serve to punish the innocent Iranian people.
The U.S. should wake up and understand that it is the biggest loser in the Middle East. The blood of Raisi, Amirabdollahian, other officials and the three crew members is on the hands of the U.S. presidents and secretaries of state and treasury who signed those sanction documents.
That seems to be the simplest and the most reasonable explanation for the distressing helicopter accident and Iran’s aviation crisis.
