Malasian Air Flight 17

July 19, 2014   

The terrible crash of Malaysian Air Flight 17, last Thursday, has been made worse by the increasingly obscene behavior of some in our own government and press – from the President’s almost non-stop comments that this lies squarely at the feet of Russia for Putin’s meddling in Eastern Ukraine, (damn, has he looked in the mirror lately?) to the opinion piece by David Remmick in the New Yorker, yesterday in which, after two paragraphs of suppositions and innuendoes, he says :http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/07/putin-and-the-crash-of-malaysian-airlines-flight-17.html
“But let’s stop here and register the proper cautions and caveats: There has been no investigation, no conclusive proof. (And there won’t necessarily be a proper and convincing investigation, either, considering the deliberately chaotic and militarized state of eastern Ukraine these days, and Russia’s clear interests.) We shouldn’t pretend to know for certain what we don’t.”

Then, he goes on for the next dozen or so paragraphs to pretend just that.

It’s a hard thing for this old Liberal to confess, that the most non-inflammatory thing I read on the internet Thursday was an AP article on foxnews.com http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/07/17/airliners-that-have-been-shot-down/# which consisted of a simple statement about how, as unthinkable as the shooting down of a commercial airliner was, it had happened before and a list of eight examples, (all of which I remember from the last forty years).

Of course, our meddling in Ukraine over the last eight or so years – including the recent meddling in the coup that started this war- serves our own interests just as much as it does Putin’s, so it would behoove us to ask, in the midst of this propaganda blitz of Putin-blaming, whether the tragic downing of this plane doesn’t also serve our own interests as much or more than his.

After all, as Paul Craig Roberts points out near the end of one of his pieces, “Among the reports or rumors there is one that says Putin’s presidential plane flew a similar route to that of the Malaysian airliner within 37 minutes of one another. This report has led to speculation that Washington decided to rid itself of Putin and mistook the Malaysian airliner for Putin’s jet. RT reports that the two airplanes are similar in appearance.” http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/17/sanctions-airliners-paul-craig-roberts/

With President Putin having just met with the other BRICS members to set up their own development bank and currency reserve, in challenge to the US dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund, wouldn’t the declining Empire take seriously this threat to its hegemonic grip on world trade?  We certainly did in Libya.  And it was at least one of the reasons we took out Saddam Hussein.

With our own CIA “advising” the Kiev government (which also has the Russian made missile batteries rumored to have brought the plane down) in its war with Eastern Ukraine, might it not be in the Empire’s “national interests” to try and take out Putin by such a false flag operation and accidentally bring down the wrong plane?

I feel certain that the Russian media are just as busy pointing this out to their people as ours and our European allies are busy pointing out the contrary view to the world.

So we can see how easy it is to play this vile game of accusation and innuendos over the bodies of the victims of that terrible crash, even before the crash scene stops smoldering. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time one of our Presidents used such a tragedy for propaganda gain. (President Reagan did just that, with the shooting down of the Korean airliner by a Russian fighter jet in 1983 – even though we knew it was accidental, from our own intelligence gathered at the time.)

Aside from the unbelievable cruelty of such games in regard to the families and friends of the crash victims, there are broader consequences. There is a real war going on in the Ukraine, instigated as much by us as by Russia. And whatever happened in the crash of MAL Flight 17, real people who had nothing to do with that war died as a result.

The declining Empire, in it mad frenzy to retain world hegemony, has – despite promises to the contrary – pushed NATO and its missiles right up to the borders of Russia in country after country. It and its NATO allies have destroyed one country after another in North Africa and the Middle East.

We are in overreach economically, militarily and financially. At some point, all this hubris will catch up with us. We will make another costly mistake, as we have in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and, perhaps, Ukraine/Russia. We can only throw so many oil and resource rich countries into chaos before the cost to us and our allies is too great.  When it is, let us hope the scramble to be on top of the heap over what’s left doesn’t result in WW III.

And let us hope the propaganda war we’ve instigated over MAL 17 isn’t a new step down that very road.