> We are also talking about a military that does not only have a recent string of burrowing civilian casulties, like in Afghanistan or Syria, but has been doing so in plenty of other conflicts.
> So yes, it's a bit difficult to believe that in decades of war the US ever only shot down two wrong planes, most likely that wikipedia list simply ain't anywhere to complete, like most of them.
I think your starting with what you want to believe is true and then walking back from that to find evidence to fit a narrative. There’s no reason to think that because the U.S. has willingly or unwillingly killed people in, say, an Afghan village that they’d be likely to misidentify commercial aircraft which have technology that positively identifies the aircraft. And in one case I recall with Iran it was a tense situation and you can at least give some amount of plausible deniability to the US military. They did pay out to the victims too IIRC, certainly not something that Russia or others have done.
As you mentioned, the U.S. has a global military presence. That means that encountering commercial aircraft all over the world would be a common occurrence and positive identification of those aircraft comes from U.S. led or contributed technologies and processes for making sure that they aren’t misidentified. So I’m not really sure it’s difficult to believe that the U.S. just doesn’t make many mistakes here, whereas in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria the situation is not comparable, error-prone, and quite complicated.