This one is just low-hanging fruit and I can’t help myself.
New York Times
June 18, 2001Senator Biden, who met President Bush at the White House just before he left for Europe, questioned whether trust was the right word to use about Mr. Putin, a former operative of the K.G.B., the Soviet intelligence service, and former head of Russia’s domestic intelligence service. At their news conference in Slovenia, Mr. Bush said of Mr. Putin: ”I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
Senator Biden said that for his part, ”I don’t trust Mr. Putin; hopefully the president was being stylistic rather than substantive.”
Vladimir Putin is the furthest thing from trustworthy. He’s also a huge troublemaker. And he’s deliberately destabilized his own border region and turned a part of Europe into a no-fly zone.
It’s true that we don’t have all the facts but it certainly appears that ethnic Russian separatists were allowed to get control of military-grade surface to air missiles and were not dissuaded by Putin from taking pot-shots at whatever flies through Eastern Ukrainian airspace. I think Josh Marshall has it right:
Find extremists and hot-heads of the lowest common denominator variety, seed them with weaponry only a few militaries in the world possess – and, well, just see what happens. What could go wrong?
The audio tapes posted by The New York Times might as well be from some future Russia-based version of Waiting for Guffman or Best in Show, a comical rendering of rustics and morons stumbling into an event of vast carnage and international consequence mainly because they’re hotheads and idiots – the kind of people no one in their right minds would give world class weaponry to. It’s like finding some white supremacist/militia types on their little compound in the inter-Mountain west and giving them world class missile launchers and heavy armaments.
If you’re inclined to view Russia sympathetically and blame Europe for pushing too hard for economic integration with Ukraine, just take a look at the way Russia operated in response and the results.
I don’t think this jet was targeted because it was a civilian aircraft. I think it was targeted without much thought at all.
