These things should all be dealt with equally, no matter who the perpetrators are and who the victims.
But unlike MH17, the US took the downing of the Iranian airliner right on the chin and didn't try to deflect. They went to court (ICJ), paid the victims, and punished those responsible. It's too bad we don't see that with MH17. I wonder if we will ever see those responsible punished.
No formal apology was ever even issued, no liability was accepted, those responsible were decorated, not punished. The US paid the value of the Jet they shot down and some money per victim but never admitted any guilt.
That's because no one person was directly responsible. Even for assholes like CAPT Rogers (who certainly did everything he could to get his ship into a bad situation [1]), no Navy commanding officer wakes up in the morning hoping to get to push the button on a civilian airliner. There was much more that went into Iran Air 655 than a rogue captain [2].
And while there's plenty of room for blame to go around (we could ask the same question of military officers in 1988 as we do of Russia today: Why did you have this advanced weapons system in the hands of people so seemingly untrained and aggressive?), simply lopping off heads because something horrible happened is no more just than mob rule. There's a reason we don't simply fire everyone involved with civil aviation crashes, for example.
The "decorations" you refer to were given as a standard element of completing a tour at a duty station. They are given to everybody who completes a tour at a duty station, with the type of decoration being dependent upon rank.
You're right that the actions of the U.S. remain unacceptable, but I think we would all be happier if we could get either the separatists and/or Russia's GRU to pay the families of the victims and pay Malaysian Airlines to replace the Boeing.
I mean, even the U.S. could be bothered to do that for a nation they had been literally fighting in the waters of the Persian Gulf! Last I checked Russia wasn't in armed conflict with the Netherlands or Malaysia.
[1] http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1993-08/vincennes-... (Don't be fooled by USNI here, this piece is damning of CAPT Rogers) [2] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-4...
My main point still stands though. The US acknowledged the mistake and took measures to make sure it didn't happen again. Will we ever see the same from MH17?
These things should be dealt by LAW and JUSTICE and you should not link one to another because if you do then you end up justifying the USSR crimes because Nazi Germany did this!
UPD: A crime should be a crime in all countries. The problem is that some countries use other's crimes as an argument. I said "things should NOT all be dealt with equally" because the judgement should base not on what others think about this but what the moral and the law says.
This, of course, isn't how the world works. But if you believe it should be, it's hard to accept the Russians are the only ones who have crimes to answer for - they just seem to be the only ones being brought to account.
>The point is, that if something is illegal for one party, it's illegal for all. - in some countries the law doesn't work and this country's elite don't act basing on the law and justice but use manipulation (like my example with USSR and Nazi Germany) to justify it's actions which results in more bad things.
Example USSR-Germany is a parallel to what some Russians are stating: like the current law on blogging is okay because the US initiated similar law too. Bloggers, free media and readers are in fact victims of this manipulation because the US has nothing to do with Russia's internal policy. And still some Russians use this argument as a justification of this law.
Please read my previous comment thoroughly.
Now I do believe that Russia probably supplied a missile system to Ukrainian separatists who then shot down an airliner, however I do not believe that they wanted to shoot down that airliner. It seems much more likely that they were paranoid idiots.
If you look at all the different political responses to airliners being downed by military recklessness, the one thing that seems consistent is the complete lack of consistency.
It was shot down during joint Russian-Ukrainian trainings, missile was sent from Russian base... but somehow Ukraine got all the blame?
