Oh My God!

[Weybridge]

Is this the same airline that recently lost a plane?

They have no excuse for shoddy safety yet again. This is a known warzone, aircraft have been shot down in this region, a fighter was shotdown in the last 2 days, pilot ejected. It doesn't really matter which side did it....I'm sure neither side did it on purpose....butas everybody knows, **** happens in the warzone.
So wtf is this airline flying over this zone?
US pilots have been told by the State Dept not to fly over this airspace for months.

Not just Malaysian Airlines, many major airlines fly over Ukraine - its a damn big country. Or flew, they're all avoiding it now. I guess they thought at 30,000 feet up, it's civilian aircraft territory, and above the ceiling for military jets.

[Lost in Transportation]

Channel 4 News ‏@Channel4News 40s

#Lavrov says Moscow does not plan to take "black box" flight recorders from pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine #c4news

[HappyHour@TheBreweryOfLife]

Looking increasingly like the work of a trigger-happy unskilled goon on one of the Buk missile systems the rebels liberated from a Ukrainian base last month.

Unintentional or not, a war crime is a war crime and an act of terror is an act of terror.

Short of sending in its own military, the West must still demand the surrender of the perpetrators for prosecution. Ukraine is party to the International Criminal Court so there's a courtroom ready and waiting. OSCE should also go in and seize the Buk's.

[Portchester PFC]

If the missles were taken from a Ukrainian base then that sort of lets the Russians off the hook, but only by the fact they never directly supplied the missles from Russia. But they are still implicated in this heavily by the fact they have been supporting and apparently arming the militants who illegally entered another country.

Still worrying that this could easily escalate out of control, either way Russia are going to be in a dark lonely place for a long time i think.

[HappyHour@TheBreweryOfLife]

Calculate these odds:

http://news.sky.com/story/1303420/doubl ... -oz-family

Fate does NOT like this family.

[Locky_McLockface]

Is this the same airline that recently lost a plane?

They have no excuse for shoddy safety yet again. This is a known warzone, aircraft have been shot down in this region, a fighter was shotdown in the last 2 days, pilot ejected. It doesn't really matter which side did it....I'm sure neither side did it on purpose....butas everybody knows, **** happens in the warzone.
So wtf is this airline flying over this zone?
US pilots have been told by the State Dept not to fly over this airspace for months.

Not just Malaysian Airlines, many major airlines fly over Ukraine - its a damn big country. Or flew, they're all avoiding it now. I guess they thought at 30,000 feet up, it's civilian aircraft territory, and above the ceiling for military jets.

The route had been declared safe by the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

[Pompey Junglist]

Excellent article by Brendan O'Neill in Spiked on the West's response to this. Only Spiked and Peter Hitchens seem to 'get it', in my opinion.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/ar ... 81lmmhwbbU

Our media is now worse than ever for presenting hearsay as fact and it's both stupid and dangerous. They've learnt nothing from Iraq.

[pompeygunner]

Hmmm, its ok IMO but goes far to far from the truth. Hitchens-I read his article & he says dont make a global catastrophe out it. Which wont happen anyway. The West wont go to war over it.
However our govt & others have been good @ stirring up trouble in areas which are like tinderbox's. Syria, Egypt & Libya to name a few. Encouraging Arab Spring has been a disaster.
But Putin is what he is-a monster who if he could would like an Empire. What IMO will happen will be lots of tit for tat, heavy sanctions will be replied with by threats of gas shortages etc etc

[The Cincinnati Kid]

Interesting news story today on US foreign policy....Bush vs Obama.
So interfere everywhere with force (Bush)..... fail

Tread lightly and diplomacy rules (Obama)......mostly fail

Do we have any other tactics for the worlds bad actors?

Agree with PJ re the press......totally useless .....should be renamed the "Conjecterati"

[HappyHour@TheBreweryOfLife]

Excellent article by Brendan O'Neill in Spiked on the West's response to this. Only Spiked and Peter Hitchens seem to 'get it', in my opinion.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/ar ... 81lmmhwbbU

Our media is now worse than ever for presenting hearsay as fact and it's both stupid and dangerous. They've learnt nothing from Iraq.

Much of it is merely denouncing extreme theories while the rest demonstrates a fair degree of misreading of the situation...

The moral script being foisted on us is that Putin is responsible for what happened to the Malaysian Airlines flight

That's not the mainstream opinion, which is that Putin has influence but not control.

One of the main claims made about the tragedy – that it was carried out with a ground-to-air missile supplied to the rebels by Russia

The mainstream opinion is that the missiles are ex-Ukrainian military inventory.

What we have here is an attempt to squeeze what looks like a terrible mistake by Russian separatists into a moral script about murder.

They deliberately shot down the airliner. Whether they thought it was a Ukrainian military transport is pretty irrelevant on this scale. Murder is murder and incompetence is no defence when there are this many killed. It's known as 'culpable homicide'. This was also a war crime.

instead they rushed in, like political ghouls, to declare the crash site a murder scene

It is a murder scene.

Even worse, the very Western leaders now treating this tragic mistake as a conscious crime were the ones who created the space for such chaotic acts to occur, through their destabilisation of Ukraine and their tipping it over the edge from political unrest into all-out civil war.

I think Putin had more of a hand in destabilising Ukraine than the West...

We now know the blackbox recorder is in Donetsk,

No, we have only the word of pro-Russian rebel leaders for that, the side which shot down the plane. He's unconditionally taking the word of rebels while denouncing anyone who suspects otherwise.

Most importantly, the idea that the rebels in the east of Ukraine are Putin’s puppets, doing his murderous bidding, is called into question by Russia’s failure to come to the rebels’ aid when they lost two of their cities to west Ukrainians earlier this month.

That Putin didn't send in significant Russian forces into Ukraine to hep the rebels is his primary proof??

[HappyHour@TheBreweryOfLife]

Interesting news story today on US foreign policy....Bush vs Obama.
So interfere everywhere with force (Bush)..... fail

Tread lightly and diplomacy rules (Obama)......mostly fail

Do we have any other tactics for the worlds bad actors?

Agree with PJ re the press......totally useless .....should be renamed the "Conjecterati"

There is no successful once-size-fits-all international security strategy. Every crisis is different and requires a bespoke response.

Bush's doctrine was an overwhelming disaster.

Obama's approach is not perfect either but it has certainly not caused a global everlasting ****** like his predecessor's efforts did (although I think we all know that was neo-cons' desired outcome).

[Pompey Junglist]

I don't think you fully grasp the article, Happy Hour. I agree with you to a degree in some of your replies, but you don't really address the responses of western leaders which is the primary focus of the piece.

Also, let's not be silly, the expansionist EU was the initial aggressor in Ukraine and it's from their actions that this sorry chapter in Ukraine's history began. The EU has developed quite a taste for instigating coups in recent years, unfortunately this one is potentially far more dangerous than the coups they propogated in Italy and Greece.

[Pompey Junglist]

Re: Obama v Bush. I suspect time will prove that Obama's strategy has made the World a far more dangerous place than Bush ever could.

Red lines... I've a feeling we'll be talking about those for decades to come. By refusing to act when his own red lines were crossed, Obama signalled an end to America being the global policeman. While the chattering classes in the West rejoiced, the World's despots got ready for action.

[The Cincinnati Kid]

Re: Obama v Bush. I suspect time will prove that Obama's strategy has made the World a far more dangerous place than Bush ever could.

Red lines... I've a feeling we'll be talking about those for decades to come. By refusing to act when his own red lines were crossed, Obama signalled an end to America being the global policeman. While the chattering classes in the West rejoiced, the World's despots got ready for action.

Indeed....imo, Obama's main fail has been to draw his red lines and also to announce stratagy to the enemy....ie This is when we will be withdrawing from Afghan. The end to global copper is not a bad goal but you can't announce it as policy....you gotta keep the bad actors guessing as to what you might do and Obama is an easier read than Red Book One.

[HappyHour@TheBreweryOfLife]

I don't think you fully grasp the article, Happy Hour. I agree with you to a degree in some of your replies, but you don't really address the responses of western leaders which is the primary focus of the piece.

Also, let's not be silly, the expansionist EU was the initial aggressor in Ukraine and it's from their actions that this sorry chapter in Ukraine's history began. The EU has developed quite a taste for instigating coups in recent years, unfortunately this one is potentially far more dangerous than the coups they propogated in Italy and Greece.

I grasp the author's point, I just find the foundation on which he bases his argument flawed. My point being how he repeatedly redesignates 'sensationalist media speculation' as 'political discourse'. I see little in the Western response that suggests they are using this tragedy to (re)assert global relevance/moral superiority and/or trying to reboot another Cold War.

And there's a world of difference between 'ex-Soviet satellites wanting to be part of a liberal Western community of nation states' and 'the EU toppling pro-Russian governments'. Putin has made this mess in his no-holds-barred desperation to retain influence and dominance over the former Soviet empire. He has more driven them away than Europe has actively coveted them.