Coincidences

Do you believe in coincidences?  I suppose they can happen, though sometimes they're hard to swallow.  Is it really a coincidence that back in 1981 the Iranians released their American hostages on the same day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president, and that Washington was sending missiles to Iran just a month later?  If you believe that's a coincidence and not the result of a back room deal, you can believe anything.

It's also a remarkable coincidence that in 1988 an American warship in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian airliner, and just six months later an American airliner got blown up over Scotland. (I was living in Glasgow at the time.) It's always seemed to me that this is the sort of "tit for tat" response that the Iranians would have been capable of.  But I suppose it could be a coincidence.  You can never ignore theoretical possibilities.