It was probably a bomb.
Of course Islamic State has no significant AA capabilities over Sinai, but it is exceeding rare for airplanes – even ill serviced ones – to catastrophically break up in midair.
According to Razib Khan’s recent purview of PEW polls, 64% of Egyptian Muslims favor the death penalty for apostasy. Conservatively assuming 80% of the population is Sunni Muslim, that’s 51% of the population that are essentially Islamist extremists and potential Islamic State sympathizes. That also happens to be the exact percentage that voted for Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi in 2012.
As such, the presence of an Islamist sleeper cell amongst airport security that helped smuggle a bomb aboard or even just turned a blind eye to is trivially easy to imagine.
If that is what the investigation finds, will Russia react by sending a serious land contingent to Syria? Highly unlikely. Russian discussions of the Syria intervention positively revolve around Afghanistan, as well as the US experience in Vietnam. This is a mistake that I think has consciously been ruled out. Even much of the Russian media has generally been sidestepping the obvious explanation and playing up the idea that it was an accident (and to hell with what it does to the already poor reputation of Russian airlines). I think it’s pretty clear that this is the result of an order from the Kremlin to that effect. Public passions shouldn’t be ignited.
Why the percentage recorded as voting for Morsi in the presidential election, and not the considerably higher percentage recorded as voting for MB or salafists in the parliamentary one, should be relevant I do not know. In general, one should be wary of the Saudi-paid-for propaganda blaming everything down to ingrown toenails on the MB. Some Syrian MB members are among the Russian-compiled list of acceptable interlocutors in the Syrian “opposition”.
[I think it’s pretty clear that this is the result of an order from the Kremlin to that effect. Public passions shouldn’t be ignited.]
That could fit in with an intention not to take any action, or with an intention that when action is taken it should be unexpected.
The poll suggested they would condone it, not favor it. Even then I don’t think these numbers can be taken at face value. The masses in those countries are under a great deal of pressure to conform to social expectations regarding Islamic values. Even if they personally felt it’s permissible to leave Islam or wouldn’t dream of killing an apostate, social pressure would incline many of them to mouth agreement with sharia dictates. (Think of white liberals who loudly decry ‘racism’ but are among the first to flee when it gets too black.) This is true even when their opinions are given anonymously. I’ve read accounts of people voting for ‘far right’ parties because of immigration who claim they were sweating and their hand shaking in the voting booth, even though there was obviously nobody there watching them.
I am done with this website.
Three times, in the comments below the “Germany against itself” article by Linh Dinh, I posted a politely worded request for a message that holocaust deniers are not welcome.
Three times, my post was suppressed. So much for free speech on unz.com.
I’m sure this post will also be deleted, but at least a few people will see it and know why I no longer participate here.
Irony is dead.
“If that is what the investigation finds, will Russia react by sending a serious land contingent to Syria? Highly unlikely. Russian discussions of the Syria intervention positively revolve around Afghanistan, as well as the US experience in Vietnam.”
If that is the case, Putin will deservedly look like a contemptable coward before the world. If ISIS were found to have blown up a US airliner. even Obama would probably have to send troops in reposnse. Afghanistan and Vietnam analogies are misplaced: Those were superpower proxy wars, in which the proxy forces enjoyed constant resupply via a geographically contiguous safe haven (Pakistan in the former, North Vietnam in the latter). No rival superpower is backing ISIS, and ISIS territory doesn’t have any sympathetic state on its border.
It would be a relatively easy matter for 20,000 or so Russian troops to strip ISIS of all its territory, then turn it over to the Syrian/Iraqi armies, declare victory, and go home (perhaps leaving behind some small residual force of 5000 troops or so).
However, I find it hard to believe that, in the event that investigators conclusively establish a bomb was responsible, Putin would really be so craven. After all, he was willing to send tens of thousands of troops to Chechnya, where Russia had recently experienced a defeat worse than Afghanistan. And the Russian army today is far more capable than the one which won the Second Chechen War.
“It would be a relatively easy matter for 20,000 or so Russian troops to strip ISIS of all its territory, then turn it over to the Syrian/Iraqi armies, declare victory, and go home”
Is that really realistic? Sounds a bit too easy.
Putin should just order heavy retaliatory airstrikes on Raqqa.
“Is that really realistic? Sounds a bit too easy.
Putin should just order heavy retaliatory airstrikes on Raqqa.”
20,000 plus air power is the often-cited figure for how many troops the US would need in a ground campaign to destroy the Islamic State, and it’s probably similar for Russia. ISIS is not well-armed, its expansion has been due to the ineffectiveness of Arab armies.
I don’t think Russia can do much more against military targets in Raqqa with airstrikes, than it and the US are already doing. And simply carpet-bombing the city would cost Russia all the international sympathy it has gained, while accomplishing nothing in terms of punishing ISIS and deterring future attacks, since ISIS doesn’t care about civilian casualties.
But chutzpah is alive and well.
The bomb was intended as a provocation but i think it will have the opposite effect.
Putin was in danger of getting cocky.
The city I was thinking of has a name that starts with R and is in the near east, but it’s not Raqqa.
Riad? That would be nice and is long overdue, but unfortunately won’t happen.
Ok, thanks for the answer. I’m still not sure, if 20 000 Western or Russian ground troops would be sufficient; don’t think we’ll find out in the near future (though who knows how things will be in 2017 or 2018).
It’s obvious that it was not “ISIS” that placed the bomb or shot down the plane and I’m not ruling out the possibility of a missile either since it could be fired from another party in the region or given to them by one of Russia’s opponents in the Syrian war. So the fact that “ISIS” in the region has no AA means absolutely nothing since a) it is something that it cannot be confirmed and b) it is more likely that the group that bombed/shot the plane had intelligence assistance and was armed by an advanced military with such capabilities since it is a given that western intelligence agencies are behind the terrorist cells operating in the wider region to anyone who hasn’t been living inside a mayonnaise jar.
An interesting claim made headlines today that the Russian SU-30 that violated Turkish airspace in October did so to avoid a surface-to-air missile system. So if terrorist groups in Syria have them why not those who brought the plane down.
The reason Russia is playing the accident narrative is that if it gets to the bottom of what happened it will have to retaliate against a major Western power like the US and some of its allies who are most likely behind this. Russia will simply have to swallow this and turn the other cheek, so the “accident” story pushed by the Kremlin will do for now as it will not show cowardice in front of such blatant provocation where retaliation is imperative, as the Kremlin either tries cover it up and move on as if nothing happened or in the case that it (hopefully) prepares some kind of retaliation that is proportionate to the level of provocation.
Holocaust deniers are silly but harmless, in no small part because they are totally powerless. As opposed to for example race deniers.
I guess your understanding of ‘free speech’ is different from mine.
As you might have noticed, your comment is still standing.
I run a free speech zone here!
Originally I thought I would remove Holohoax-type comments, not least because they are almost invariably very dumb and negative value added, but in the end I decided my time is better used producing new content than moderating discussions.
Isn’t it also funny that the US and its allies supposedly “fighting” ISIS for over a year and no single attack against US/Western targets? Russia fighting ISIS for a month and becomes target of an “ISIS” attack or so we’re told. Is it perhaps that the US sucks at fighting ISIS or doesn’t fight it at all and Russia in contrast is far more effective? Something more sinister like that the US fighting ISIS is a smokescreen and ISIS is a US proxy?
The US and its allies have killed millions of Muslims over the last 15 years of the “war on terror” and destroyed numerous states, but no single attack on US targets. Russia according to ISIS killing Muslims in Syria for one month and becomes target of a terrorist attack.
The whole narrative is total bullshit and stinks from every angle. The US simply sent Putin a message to stay out of their way.
War in Chechnya was a necessity, involvement in Syria is a choice.
Russia is no superpower.
It has to be more careful than the USA and its government shows more restrained.
Looks like someone missed the operations against Daesh in the North Caucasus.
Better look a contemptible coward than be a manipulatable idiot.
Russian ground intervention is a very, very bad idea from any angle one cares to look at it.
@Anatoly Karlin
“Better look a contemptible coward than be a manipulatable idiot.”
Putin by refusing to name the US as the culprit behind the attack because he doesn’t have the spine to retaliate and lying about this being an accident as not to “ignite passions” is both.
@Mitleser
“Looks like someone missed the operations against Daesh in the North Caucasus.”
Looks like someone missed the fact that this is a campaign outside Russian borders, where the objective is not to stop a terrorist group threatening Russia’s territorial integrity, but to stop US attempts at unilateral regime change now and forever.
What’s the supposed “manipulation” here? Surely you don’t think ISIS wants to be invaded by the Russian army? Presumably, if this was a bomb, and ISIS was responsible, they would have been operating on the assumption that Russia would probably not respond by invading and destroying their quasi-state (although this would be quite a gamble, given that Putin invaded Chechnya in response to some apartment bombings, and has a reputation as a tough guy to maintain).
It’s a very, very bad idea to essentially announce to the world that Russian passenger planes can be blown up without any serious consequence. If one downed plane and 200+ dead isn’t enough, then what exactly is the threshold for the use of ground troops in response to a terrorist attack?
Aww. And they didn’t immediately send you lots and lots of other people’s money either? What the hell is the world coming to when you can’t guilt somebody into censoring somebody else?
You should go to Taki’s and commiserate with David Cole who wrote a tearful piece lamenting that not even Netanyahu could manipulate other nations into airstrikes against Iran after chanting “6 million, 6 million, 6 million” then frowning very hard. I’m sure somebody somewhere will kill an Arab for you though..
Buh-bye!
Chechnya was RF territory and completely incomparable in every other respect to boot (was also closer; had 1 million people, not the ~10 million that ISIS and “moderate rebels” control between them; was under complete Russian air control, whereas the Americans would be capable of wiping out the Latakia airbase at any moment of their choosing).
Even so, the Russia federal government waited until 1994 (and the ethnic cleansing of traditionally Russian land north of the River Terek) before it began the first campaign against Chechnya. It then retreated, negotiated for three years in 1996-99, and only went back when the Chechens launched a land invasion of Russian territory.
More recently, 5000 Russian coethnic civilians were killed by the Ukrainian junta, and thousands more Russians remain political prisoners to this day. Even so, Russia responded with far less force than it has already shown to the Islamic State – an evil entity to be sure, but one that’s ultimately quite marginal to the security of Russians today.
Against all of that the downing of a Russian passenger plane, even if Islamic State is shown to be completely responsible for, will still be mere peanuts relative to the above.
Ramadi?
No, German_reader guessed right at 12.
Is there a book about the Chechnyan wars that you would recommend (in English or German, I don’t understand Russian)?
The proximity and population differences are more than outweighed by the fact that at the time of the Chechen campaigns, the Russian military – both in its overall combat power and combat effectiveness per soldier- was in a state of complete collapse, whereas today it is the 3rd strongest in the world.
Per World Bank figures, by the time the Second Chechen War began in 1999, Russia’s military budget (nominal) had fallen by more than 90% to a mere $6 billion (less than Spain, barely larger than Sweden) vs. $84 billion in 2014. Also, during the Chechen Wars, Russia’s army consted almost entirely of poorly trained conscripts, vs. the mixed professional/conscript force that exists today.
And in Chechnya, there was no equivalent of the Syrian Army and its allies: Once Russia took control of territory, they couldn’t hand it off to anyone else.
Even if a neocon superhawk like Rubio were in power, the chances of the Americans actually doing so are miniscule. There would be near absolute zero public or congressional support for such a move.
No, sorry.
AK – yes the Americans or even Israelis (and perhaps the Turkish Air Force with Schweinfurt raid losses among the F-16 raiders until the Pantsir batteries run out rockets) COULD wipe out Latakia air base. And then watch cruise missile strikes obliterate all their bases in the theater in retaliation. Plus missiles from Crimea hitting the SBU HQ in Kiev and wiping out its CIA wing and Russian air strikes on CIA NATO merc contractors who ‘aren’t’ in Kharkov and Mariupol in a few minutes.
I appreciate the reminder of how small and vulnerable the Russian contigent in Syria is, but it’s also foolish to act like the neocon lunatics or hasbara trolls who assume the U.S./NATO/Israeli militaries are invincible and would not die in large numbers and/or suffer panics if hit by waves of supersonic missiles aren’t badly mistaken. Israel would be hard pressed holding the line against a Hezbollah assault if they lost their air cover over the Golan and certainly wouldn’t be able to do anything if much of the IAF was destroyed on the ground by Kalibrs against thousands of Hezbollah rockets raining down on Haifa and northern Tel Aviv.