When the Soviet Union mistakenly shot down a South Korean civilian airliner which had intruded into Russian airspace once, then done it again, the New York Times declared "there is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner" - they called it "Murder in the Air".
After the Vincennes missile strike on an airliner in its home airspace, an editorial in the very same paper announced that what happened to Flight 655 "raises stern questions for Iran."
That’s right - questions for Iran.
Two years later the U.S. Navy gave the Vincennes’s commander the highly prestigious Legion of Merit commendation.
There has been silence from this "decorated hero" of the US - unlike the Russian who brought down the Korean Jet and is deeply shocked by what he was forced to do:
"They [KAL 007] quickly lowered their speed. They were flying at 400 km/h (249 mph). My speed was more than 400. I was simply unable to fly slower. In my opinion, the intruder's intentions were plain. If I did not want to go into a stall, I would be forced to overshoot them. ... already flown over the island [Sakhalin] ... the target was about to get away ... the ground [controller] gave the command: 'Destroy the target...!' That was easy to say. But how? With shells? I had already expended 243 rounds. [I was loaded with armor piercing shells, not incendiary shells. It's doubtful whether anyone could see them...] Ram it? I had always thought of that as poor taste. Ramming is the last resort. Just in case, I had already completed my turn and was coming down on top of him. Then, I had an idea. I dropped below him about 2,000 meters... afterburners. Switched on the missiles and brought the nose up sharply. Success! I have a lock on."[37]
Sadly, someone in Russian damage limitation did lie a bit about this downing but in a 1991 interview with Izvestia, Major Genadi Osipovich was open about the case:
"We shot down the plane legally... Later we began to lie about small details: the plane was supposedly flying without running lights or strobe light, that tracer bullets were fired, or that I had radio contact with them on the emergency frequency of 121.5 megahertz."[38]
... but that is as nothing compared with the lies told by the Captain of the Vincennes and his entire command.
Nearly all of these claims made by U.S. military and government officials about why Flight 655 was fired upon were lies, and the subsequent investigation was effectively one big cover-up, reports in Newsweek and by Nightline later revealed. See http://web.archive.org/web/20060527221409/http:/dolphin.upenn.edu/~nrotc/ns302/20note.html or a much more robust account here see http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2013/10/the-crying-of-flight-655.html of 16th Oct 2013
TL:DR - Iranians have every reason to hate the US - which has every reason to apologise.
Oh, yeah, and don't think the US had any excuse to side with Saddam Hussein over the "Tanker War" which, like the earlier "Iran-Iraq War" was entirely an act of aggression by, you guessed it, Saddam Hussein.
PS - anyone here need to know how proxy, Saddam Hussein, started the "Tanker War" attacks, about which the West was totally silent until Iran, allegedly, retaliated so feebly we've no evidence of it? My references are at the strictly Western-biased https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War and http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/wars_tanker.html as should be good enough for anyone.