You mean get on the blower: "Please would you tell those planes to stop shooting at us..." I think they probably did that, and that was why the order came through to "Abort, Abort", but unfortunately rather too late.

I suppose they could have looked up in the sky and said "Aren't those American planes up there - we'd better get on to their controllers pretty damn quick, before they start attacking us." But I think they might have been a bit busy looking out for enemies on the ground.

And they'd have assumed, correctly enough, that the pilots would see their identifying marks on their vehicles. They couldn't have been expected to know that the pilots would be overruled by their controllers, and told that the vehicles were definitely Iraqi. And nor coudl anyine have known that bit if the authorities had succeeded in keeping the video record under wraps.

Which would have meant that it would have all been seen as the fault of some trigger-happy pilots. The kind of scapegoating which they evidently expected to happen, from what they said in that tape about "We're in jail."