On Sept. 1, 1983, Soviet fighter aircraft shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which had inadvertently entered Soviet airspace on its way from Anchorage to Seoul, killing all 269 people on board.
President Ronald Reagan swiftly condemned “this crime against humanity,” which only redoubled his desire to bring down the “evil empire.”
We can only hope for similar moral clarity today from the United States and Europe in the aftermath of the equally outrageous shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine with 295 people on board including more than 20 US citizens.
The exact circumstances remain murky, but there is a strong circumstantial case, based on what we already know, that this was the work of pro-Russian separatist rebels who had been provided by the Kremlin with an advanced Buk anti-aircraft missile system.
As Julia Ioffe of The New Republic notes:
“There are now screenshots floating around the Russian-language Internet from what seems to be the Facebook page of Igor Strelkov, a rebel leader in eastern Ukraine, showing plumes of smoke and bragging about shooting down a Ukrainian military Antonov plane shortly before MaH 17 fell. ‘Don’t fly in our skies,’ he reportedly wrote. If that’s true, it would seem rebels downed the jetliner, having mistaken it for a Ukrainian military jet.”
Certainly it wouldn’t be surprising to see the rebels, shooting down suspected Ukrainian aircraft.
Just before the Malaysian plane went down, Ukraine’s government accused a Russian fighter plane of shooting down one of its own fighters in Ukrainian airspace on Wednesday.
Just a few days earlier, Ukraine accused Russian rebels of shooting down a Ukrainian transport aircraft.
The deaths of all those innocents aboard the Malaysian aircraft, who were in no way party to this conflict, makes it impossible for the West to look away from Russian aggression or for Russia to escape culpability.
Even if the shootdown was accidental, as seems likely, Vladimir Putin is nevertheless ultimately responsible.
Hand a bazooka to a hyperactive teen who then destroys a neighbor’s house, and the person providing the weapon is just as culpable as the one firing it.
There is no doubt that the Russian state has provided anti-aircraft missiles, along with tanks and other advanced weaponry, to pro-Russian separatists, many of them Russian citizens and even members of the Russian intelligence and military services.
You don’t pick up an anti-aircraft missile at your local military-surplus store.
The question now is what we in the West are going to do about this outrageous act of villainy. Sen. John McCain said that if Russian involvement is proved, there will be “hell to pay.” What would that consist of?
No one contemplates the use of Western military force, but there is much that America and Europe could do to provide military equipment and training to Ukraine’s armed forces to enable them to defeat Putin’s minions — something we’ve feared to do until now for fear of triggering Russian escalation.
There is also a need to station substantial numbers of American ground forces in frontline NATO states including Poland and the Baltics to make clear that they’ll stand up to Russian aggression.
Seeing US troops on his doorstep is pretty much the last thing Putin wants, and that’s precisely why we should do so.
In addition, the United States needs to end its military drawdown and rebuild our strength to confront our enemies, as Reagan did.
Finally, the United States and Europe need to beef up their limited sanctions against Russia.
On Wednesday, President Obama announced fresh sanctions against several Russian financial institutions and oil and gas producers, barring them from the US market.
This stops well short of the sanctions on the Russian financial and energy sectors that Obama had previously threatened. And the European Union only promised to block future loans for projects in Russia by European development banks.
Perhaps now the EU will get off its knees and join the US in truly broad sanctions that will do real damage to the Russian economy.
Oh, and perhaps now France will consider not delivering to Russia two Mistral-class amphibious assault ships that would considerably enhance Moscow’s ability to terrorize its neighbors.
I say “perhaps” because this probably won’t happen. Even now some will caution that we don’t want to “isolate” or “corner” Russia.
But if the murder of 295 innocents isn’t enough for the West to finally stand up to Russia’s barely disguised aggression in Ukraine, it’s hard to know what it will take.
Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. From Contentions, the group blog at commentarymagazine.com.