Now space prohibits herein a full account of the circumstances surrounding the shoot-down, nor does it lend itself to a 'blow by blow' of the 'argy-bargy' between the 60 Minutes crew and their much touted source Higgins, and Parry himself. Suffice to say there seemed to be few limits to the indignation the former all managed to muster when the intrepid Consortium Newsman had the temerity to meticulously and relentlessly challenge their account of the tragedy.
(Those unfamiliar with this dust-up -- one that perfectly case studies the vast gulf that exists between MSM reportage on MH-17 and that of a respected alternative news outlet -- can seehere,here,here,here,here, here, here, and here for some of the 'argy-bargy' the 'stoush' elicited and examples of the 'he said, she said' exchanges between the respective antagonists.)
It needs be noted that there was much political capital to be gained by those in Washington and most of America's allies in the West by blaming Russia for the MH-17 tragedy. The U.S. and said allies had already blamed the crisis in Ukraine that derived from the February 2014 coup on Russian "aggression" and Putin's purported ambitions to resurrect the Soviet Union. So in one sense it was to be expected they'd seek to capitalize on this disaster by blaming the Russians.
Western leaders to this end began tripping over themselves in singling out 'Vlad the Derailer' as the bad guy du jour, all the while doing so unencumbered by anything approximating solid evidence to support this stance. As we might expect with the Russia-gate saga, to this day, no definitive proof of the hard-core forensic kind has been presented to identify exactly how the plane was shot down (was the missile launched from the air or from the ground?), much less who actually perpetrated the act (was it the anti-Russian Ukrainian military, the pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, or the Russians themselves?) Again, to this day, the questions as to whether the plane was deliberately targeted (was it a false-flag attack?, or did it just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time), also remain unanswered.
As noted, the downing of MH-17 cost the lives of 38 Aussies, and the fallout from the tragedy -- to say nothing of the way the disaster was politicized in order to serve the broader geopolitical objectives of the Beltway Bedlamites and their apparatchiks at home along with their counterparts in other Western nations -- was especially pronounced Down Under. Our then Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who took to sculling the Washington Kool-Aid by asserting it was Putin himself who was "personally responsible" for the disaster, was especially bolshie in his reaction.
Ahead of Putin's visit to this country in November 2014 for the G20 meeting in Brisbane that year, Abbott threatened to "shirt-front" the Russian president over the issue when they officially met up. Whilst this made for great headlines here and abroad, it did nothing to arrest his slide in the opinion polls, which one can reasonably surmise was at the time somewhere in the back of his mind. All in all, coming from a national leader on the world stage, this unprecedented, petulant outburst was something to behold.
But such was the fervor of the times regarding MH-17, and more broadly, the anti-Russian sentiment that prevailed earlier in the year over Russia's "invasion" of Ukraine in the aftermath of America's bespoke coup d'e'tat. Clearly Abbott's desire to leverage the public outrage here in Australia that accompanied the tragedy and to ingratiate himself with the Bedlamites far outweighed any obligation that might've routinely accompanied a more measured diplomatic response. (It was after all to no avail; Abbott's hold on the Aussie 'premiership' was itself 'shirt-fronted' by one of his former cabinet colleagues about a year after making this comment, being successfully challenged for the leadership by the present PM Malcolm Turnbull.)
It should further be noted that many folks -- mostly after the fact -- justified the removal of the then Ukrainian government because it was irredeemably corrupt. This of course is a specious and convenient argument -- a 'justification' that makes frequent cameos in the annals of regime change -- partly so in this case because there's little evidence the replacement regime has been any less corrupt.
But this raises an altogether different, arguably more important consideration: If Uncle Sam had removed every last one of the countless client tyrants he's had on his imperial dance card over the decades on the sole basis of their ethical, moral and/or legal standards of governance, adherence to democratic principles, and/or general political probity, it's fair to surmise the geopolitical terrain might look as different today as the lunar landscape does to an as yet still pristine portion of the Amazonian rainforest. And the U.S. might still retain -- and be able to credibly lay claim to -- some of the moral capital it had accrued by war's end in 1945, which few would argue it has now all but frittered away.
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