28/07/2014
It seems to me that three points need to guide us in our appreciation of MH17 â and generally on contentious issues. The first is that just because one party to a dispute is lying, that does not mean that the other parties are necessarily telling the truth.
The second point is that, just because a party tells lies, everything they say will always be lies. Sometimes, just to confuse the issue, they tell the truth - after all, the best way of lying is to cloak your deceit in the garments of truth.
Thirdly, rather like the first point, just because a party self evidently has something to hide, and is therefore not telling the whole truth, that does not mean that other parties do not also have things to hide. Everybody might have something to hide, albeit they may be hiding different things.
And with that in mind, later than usual â but posted for the record â we have the
Booker column, which takes up the very real and important question of whether President Obama could have prevented the MH17 tragedy.
This, says Booker, is the most alarming unanswered question over the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, one so fearful to contemplate that it has scarcely even been asked. Was President Obama in fact been better placed than anyone else to prevent that disaster from taking place?
When, in his statement 24 hours after the plane was downed, the President stoked speculation about the involvement of President Putin, did he deliberately obscure the fact that, days earlier, he had already learnt enough from his many intelligence sources to know that the 55 international airliners travelling every day along that flight path over eastern Ukraine faced the threat of precisely such a disaster?
If so, why did the US authorities not make it a top priority to ensure that such flights were immediately halted?
In all the initial confusion over what Mr Obama called "this outrage of unspeakable proportions", there was a hysterical rush to pin the blame on Russiaâs president. "Putin's killed my son", as one newspaper front page had it. But, over the days that followed, as ever more information emerged about this story, the US government appeared to be backtracking on its original narrative.
The 30-year-old SA-11, or Buk M1 missile launcher, apparently responsible for the downing of MH17, had not been recently smuggled in over the Russian border, as was alleged. It had almost certainly been in Ukraine all along, as part of the equipment of Ukraine's official armed forces.
On June 29, several launchers were probably captured from those forces, in a non-operational state, by the pro-Russian rebels. By July 13, at least one was again fully functional, and used the next day to down a Ukrainian Antonov 26 transport aircraft, from a height that only such a missile could have reached.
All this, including the exact position from where the fatal missile was launched, would almost certainly have been detected by the plethora of US satellites that have been closely monitoring that area, and confirmed by other intelligence, including mobile-phone intercepts.
It is inconceivable that this did not ring alarm bells with anyone, including the authorities in Kiev, which should have had prime responsibility for immediately closing their airspace.
But for various reasons, not least the sizeable income Ukraine would have lost from the airlines making 350 flights a day across the country as a whole, they did nothing. No one, then, was in a better position to know the danger that air travellers were being exposed to than Washington. Which also apparently did nothing.
It was three days after the downing of the Antonov that the rebels shot down MH17, almost certainly unaware that it was an airliner. When Mr Obama made his statement, he explicitly mentioned the Antonov, but fogged over the implications of that earlier incident by blurring it with the rebelsâ shooting-down of other aircraft from lower altitudes, using much less powerful rockets.
Mr Obama then went on to say that "we know that these separatists have received a steady flow of support from Russia", including "anti-aircraft weapons".
The uncomfortable question, to which the world really does deserve an answer, is why, in the light of all that has emerged as to how much Washington knew in the days before MH17 was shot down, did it not take steps to ensure that civilian overflights were immediately halted?
As so often before in the West's weak and wrong-headed response to the Ukrainian shambles â created more than anything by those vaingloriously provocative moves to absorb that country into the EU â we can begin to understand rather better the way in which Europe sleepwalked into war in the summer of 1914.
Pray God, Booker concludes, it does not come to that this time. But the hysterical misreading of this latest chapter in the Ukrainian tragedy has hardly inspired confidence in those who rule us.
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