Carryfast:
Rjan:
[…]Firstly to remove any doubt I’m not saying that Russia is guilty,far from it.But as I said threatening us with Nuclear attack in answer to May’s bs posturing doesn’t help Putin’s case one bit.In which case it’s in everyone’s interests to meet that threat in kind regardless just as Kennedy did.Then we negotiate having got that line in the sand established,again just as Kennedy did.
“Threatening us with nuclear attack” is hyperbole. And my point is that nothing Russia has said or done so far has affected “Putin’s case” on the Skripal poisoning (let’s face it, nobody is arguing that Putin’s innocence is beyond doubt!), whereas the Tories have smeared ■■■■ all over themselves by telling a series of lies and acting in a totally unreasonable way.
We now know that the reason the Tories refused to render a sample of the poison to Russia, is because doing so would have proved sooner that they were lying about having scientific evidence of Russia’s involvement. So too, the Tories have denied the Russians access to the Skripals - again, because doing so would have proved sooner that they were exaggerating the effects of the poisoning.
What I’m keen to emphasise is that we should stop seeing ourselves as akin to a court of law calling upon Putin to answer for himself - we do not stand over Putin with the authority of a court of law, and we have offered no evidence (so far, an actual judge following normal criminal principles would have thrown the allegations out of court as “no case to answer”).
And in the absence of both authority and evidence, the way in which people respond to such allegations is likely to have more to do with their personal temperament and the quality of the pre-existing relationship, than the inherent truth of the allegations, which is why I draw the analogy with a neighbourhood dispute.
If you have a limited number of enemies, many friends, and your political life in the community is simple and secure, it may be reasonable to suppose in most cases that your known enemies are probably responsible for bad things that befall you. But in the international arena where enemies are plenty and political interests complex, and when states and interest groups have significant resources to spend on intrigue, being willing to attack the “obvious” culprit is a political weakness that can be exploited, and you become an unpaid soldier in the service of others who are capable of manipulating you into attacking their enemies.
My problem is all the other machiavellian bollox.Which raises all the other questions regarding all the contradictions which I’ve pointed out.With the game having moved on now to the far more dangerous situation of the combined issue of the UK/EU/US having all gone rogue regarding two possible false flag operations.Ironically the lesser of which being the Salisbury incident and the far bigger question of Syria ( again ) with the anti Assad Saudi backed loons controlling that agenda with yet another supposed fake chem attack by Russia/Syria.
Personally, I doubt the conspiracy is so deep - the purpose of false flag operations is not normally for states to manipulate the public, but for autonomous groups (which may be the intelligence arms of other states, but need not be) to manipulate the bureaucracy of the victim state.
It’s like I said on the moon landing denial subject, that the outcome of conspiracies are rarely assured and can often involve a lot of collateral political damage if they go wrong, and those with vested interests will only stomach so much political risk. The most likely conspirators are usually those whose interests are barely threatened by a negative outcome.
What has been layered on top in this case is that the Tories have sought to exploit the circumstances for their own party political ends, have made a series of unforced errors (that I really don’t think could have been predicted by any organisation planning the poisoning itself), the Tories’ links to Russian dirty money has been exposed, and their transparent manipulation of the public has been rumbled. Russia too has secured a PR coup - not because of the poisoning, but purely because of the way the Tories have handled it subsequently.
In all likelihood, if the Skripal poisoning itself was a conspiracy intended to have larger political effects, it probably hasn’t gone according to the plan of those responsible.
What the zb has moderate Assad got in common with Islamic extremist Iran ?.Or for that matter has even Putin ?.
Perhaps the common denominator is that they have all been victims to Western meddling?