Open this photo in gallery:
U.S. President Donald Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth behind, speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One, March 7.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
The United States may have lost a US$31.1-million jet fighter over Iran, but it dodged a bullet.
With the rescue of the missing crew member of its F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft, Iran lost a valuable war asset and the U.S. avoided a mortifying incident as the deadly Middle East conflict ground on well into its second month.
And while American military commanders and media commentators focused on the possibility that the missing airman might be transformed into a 21st-century version of the 20th-century Iran diplomatic hostages, the real analogue might be six high-profile fliers captured and used as propaganda weapons by U.S. opponents in earlier conflicts.
For whether in a global Cold War or a regional hot war, there have been few assets as valuable as a downed American airman.
That’s why – to cadge a phrase from Matthew Arnold’s beloved 1867 poem Dover Beach – as American and Iranian “armies clash by night,” perhaps the most consequential military effort by both sides in recent days was the dramatic, desperate drive to locate and seize the airman shot down by Iranian anti-aircraft weapons over the southwest reaches of Iran.
Opinion: The U.S. will emerge from the war with Iran as a lesser power
In the end, it was a team of Navy SEALs and pilots of hulking C-130 turboprops and rescue helicopters who played vital roles in reaching the weapons systems officer who travelled through a 7,000-foot ridge line to evade pursuers and to find safe harbour in a mountain fastness.
Though the episode underlined the continuing power of a hobbled Iran to inflict danger and resist capitulation in an asymmetrical military conflict with no apparent early end, the nocturnal search-and-rescue operation was another example of American military prowess that followed days of massive bombings and pinpoint assassinations.
Open this photo in gallery:
An image released on April 5, and obtained from social media appears to show wreckage of an American aircraft and a helicopter rotor in Isfahan, Iran.SOCIAL MEDIA/Reuters
It involved CIA intelligence operations to locate the airman, diversionary bombings to keep Iranian forces from him, and rare on-the-ground commando operations to extract him.
It also provided President Donald Trump an opening to claim an important achievement in a conflict where his vows of swift victory and unconditional surrender have been frustrated, leading to massive criticism from both his customary adversaries and MAGA adherents opposed to military engagements abroad and the prospect of “forever wars.” On his Truth Social media platform early Easter morning, he was able to proclaim “WE GOT HIM!”
It also avoided a double embarrassment for the President, who said the Iran operation “just proves once again, that we have achieved overwhelming Air Dominance and Superiority over the Iranian skies.”
Had the airman been captured, Mr. Trump surely would have been reminded that, in 1980, when amid frustrations over the diplomatic hostages, he told a TV interviewer of the need for the U.S. to be respected around the world and said, “The Iranian situation is case in point that they hold our hostages is just absolutely and totally ridiculous that this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking is a horror.”
The other danger was the likelihood of a reminder of remarks he made during the 2015 Republican primary about then senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war for more than five years after being shot down during the Vietnam War. “He’s not a war hero,” Mr. Trump said. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Open this photo in gallery:
A U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft takes off for a mission supporting Operation Epic Fury during the Iran war at an undisclosed location, March 9. Handout U.S. Air Force/via REUTERSUS AIR FORCE/Reuters
The pilot of the jet fighter shot down over Iran last week was rescued shortly after it was downed, but the fact that his crew member was missing prompted concerns, in Washington diplomatic corridors and in U.S. military operations sites used as staging areas for the conflict, of possible exploitation by Iran and another tragic wartime loss to add to the more than a dozen already killed). Iran offered a cash reward for the capture of the airman.
The Iranian order that searchers for the aviator were not to injure him suggested the possibility he might be a valuable hostage for the regime.
The drama surrounding downed airmen is how the names Richard Fecteau, John Downey, Francis Gary Powers, Mr. McCain, James Stockdale, and Michael Durant became etched in American history.
Mr. Fecteau, now 99, and Mr. Downey, who died 12 years ago, were CIA agents shot down over Manchuria in a daring 1952 operation to extract a figure they thought was an American-trained Chinese agent working with dissident generals to foment upheaval, if not actual counterrevolution, against China’s young Communist government. The U.S. argued, implausibly, that the two were on a routine flight between Korea and Japan that had gone awry. What followed were long periods of torture, isolation, and propaganda exploitation. They were in Chinese hands for two decades.
The capture of Mr. Powers, shot down over the Soviet Union in a 1960 reconnaissance mission, resulted in the cancellation of a Paris summit meeting between president Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The U.S. claimed – also implausibly, given the presence of surveillance camera in his wrecked aircraft U-2 spy plane – that the airman was piloting a weather aircraft that also went off course.
Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Stockdale were airmen shot down over North Vietnam and were tortured as prisoners of war. They later became prominent in American politics, Mr. McCain as a member of the House of Representatives and Senate from Arizona and as the unsuccessful 2008 Republican presidential nominee, and Mr. Stockdale, as Ross Perot’s running mate in the Texas billionaire’s unsuccessful 1992 presidential campaign.
Michael Durant, a helicopter pilot, was the lone survivor of an engagement that became known as the Black Hawk Down incident in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia – seared into American memory when the episode, which included the dragging of American corpses through the streets of Mogadishu, became a popular movie in 1993.
Those shot down either in reconnaissance missions or in combat eventually became American heroes, as the airman who evaded Iranian forces surely will be.
“The saga of John Downey and Richard Fecteau is about remarkable faithfulness, shown not only by the men who were deprived of their freedom, but also by an Agency that never gave up hope,” a former deputy CIA historian, Nicholas Dujmovic, wrote in an unclassified 2006 agency-commissioned assessment of the episode.
The Downey and Fecteau episode became a 2010 film, Extraordinary Fidelity. This episode seems destined to become one, too.
