{"id":23863,"date":"2014-07-18T14:29:54","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T22:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=23863"},"modified":"2014-07-18T15:26:36","modified_gmt":"2014-07-18T23:26:36","slug":"the-tragedy-of-flight-mh17-who-benefits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/18\/the-tragedy-of-flight-mh17-who-benefits\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tragedy of Flight MH17: Who Benefits?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screen-Shot-2014-07-17-at-4.57.25-PM\"<\/a>Cui bono? Who benefits? Who stood to gain?\u00a0That\u00a0is the first question everyone should ask with any potential crime (although of course it’s not the only one). Yet, that is the question that is being generally\u00a0ignored regarding the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. Instead, the western media leaps\u00a0to “whodunnit?” only to immediately answer their own question with, “Well obviously either Russia, the separatists, or both.”<\/p>\n

The reason for this is obvious. If they were to even consider the “qui bono?”\u00a0question, they would have to admit that there is virtually no way that either\u00a0Russia or\u00a0the Donetsk separatists could possibly have expected to benefit from downing\u00a0an airline full of internationals. There was no strategic value in it, and they couldn’t have expected it to be\u00a0blamed in western media on anyone else or\u00a0to do anything other than galvanize world opinion against them. Therefore, if either did do it (which is highly unlikely, given that the Russians were not directly fighting in the area, and the separatists were most likely\u00a0not prepared\u00a0to reach a flight at that altitude, given the limitations of their equipment and experience), it was almost surely by mistake.<\/p>\n

This does not eliminate any\u00a0culpability and\u00a0liability they might\u00a0carry, but it does make ridiculous their characterization\u00a0by some\u00a0as mustache-twirling super-villains, on the part of the Russians,\u00a0or crazed international terrorists, on the part of the separatists, out to murder any citizen of the free world who wanders into their grasp.\u00a0It should also knock the legs out from any attempt to use this tragedy as a justification\u00a0for the U.S. to increase intervention, for the E.U. to increase\u00a0sanctions, or for world opinion to deny the separatists’ right to\u00a0self-determination.<\/p>\n

If the Ukrainian government downed the plane (which they were fully equipped to do), it might have been by mistake on their part as well, but not necessarily. That is because they, in contrast, could very well have expected to gain by downing the plane, for precisely the opposite reason: namely, that it was very likely that the western media, already sympathetic with\u00a0them anyway, would pin the blame on their enemies, as of course they actually did.<\/p>\n

The situation is similar to the gas attack that was almost used as casus belli<\/em> by the U.S. for bombing Syria to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Especially after Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line”, the international fighters trying to overthrow Assad had everything to benefit by attacking locals with such weapons, since it could easily be pinned on the Syrian government, and Assad had nothing. Ignoring this obvious fact, the political class used the incident to (unsuccessfully, thankfully)\u00a0try to convince the western\u00a0public to support airstrikes on Syria. And the most likely\u00a0interest-analysis assessment of the situation turned out to be the correct one, as\u00a0subsequent conclusive evidence showed<\/a>\u00a0that Syrian government forces could not have been behind the sarin attack, and it very likely may have been Syrian rebels provided with chemical weapons by Turkey.<\/p>\n

And yet, Russia and the separatists had even less<\/em> to gain from an atrocity than the Syrian government, since Assad could have at least conceivably gained extremely short-sighted strategic benefits from gassing his enemies, whereas the former could gain absolutely nothing\u00a0from killing tourists.<\/p>\n

Speaking of cui bono<\/em>, not even the biggest sell-outs in\u00a0the establishment media stand to gain from the nuclear holocaust they are risking by whipping up anti-Russian hysteria in the west and tension between two nuclear powers. So they should seriously\u00a0consider going off-script for once, ask the most basic questions, and be honest about the most obvious truths for a change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cui bono? Who benefits? Who stood to gain?\u00a0That\u00a0is the first question everyone should ask with any potential crime (although of course it’s not the only one). Yet, that is the question that is being generally\u00a0ignored regarding the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. Instead, the western media leaps\u00a0to “whodunnit?” only to immediately answer their own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":193,"featured_media":23865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,3,26],"tags":[660],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-23863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","category-news","category-russia","tag-ukraine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/Screen-Shot-2014-07-17-at-4.57.25-PM.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/193"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23863"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23870,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23863\/revisions\/23870"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23863"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=23863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}