Friday, a group of ISIS extremists claimed credit for the attack on a Moscow theater that killed at least 133 people and left the building a smoldering ruin. But Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his public comments today, didn’t mention ISIS-K: instead, he placed the blame on Ukraine.
As The New York Times headline after Putin’s remarks laid out: “In First Remarks on Attack, Putin Tries to Link Assailants to Ukraine.” The article’s lede says it all:
“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia laid the groundwork on Saturday for blaming Ukraine for the Moscow concert hall attack. And in making his first remarks on the assault more than 19 hours after it began, he pledged to punish the perpetrators, ‘whoever they may be, whoever may have sent them.’”
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We’ve seen this movie before, both here, in Israel, and Germany, and it never ends well.
In 2002, Russia was engaged in a similar war with Chechnya, trying to subdue and subsume a nation that has been both under Russian rule and independent over the past several centuries, very much like Ukraine.
A theater in Moscow was seized that year by “Chechen rebels” who began executing theater-goers: Putin ordered poisonous gas apparently made of something like fentanyl poured into the theater, and it let his police take back the theater (although many of the hostages, along with their tormentors, died from the gas).
Putin used the attack as an excuse to escalate his years-long conflict with the parts of Chechnya that still were fighting for their independence from Russia and launched a major WWII-style land invasion and bombing campaign. Tens of thousands died, entire cities were destroyed, and Chechnya was largely subdued within the year.
In the aftermath of that 2002 theater attack and subsequent war there was speculation from multiple sources and countries that Putin knew the attack was coming and welcomed it, believing he could use it as an excuse to escalate his low-level conflict with Chechnya and finally seize full control of the country.
In this case, the United States says we warned Russian intelligence weeks ago that this attack or something very much like it was coming. And Putin is in a bit of a crisis right now, with people openly protesting his “election” and angry about his murder of Alexi Navalny.
Is Putin running the same play?
He wouldn’t be the first.
Germans remember well that fateful day ninety-one years ago last month: February 27, 1933. It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack.
A Dutch communist named Marius van der Lubbe had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The German intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians still argue whether rogue elements in Hitler’s intelligence service helped him; the most recent research implies they did not, but simply watched him proceed.)
And then van der Lubbe took down the prize of Germany, the Parliament building (the Reichstagsgebäude), setting it ablaze on that day in February.
Hitler knew the strike was coming (although he apparently didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was van der Lubbe who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.
“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion — “a sign from God,” he called it — to declare an all-out “war on terrorism” and the groups he said were its ideological sponsors, the communists and Jews.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected “allies” of the infamous terrorist. Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, Hitler had pushed through legislation — in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the “liberal” philosophy he said spawned it — that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus.
His Decree on the Protection of People and State allowed police to intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
It was the beginning of the end of a democratic Germany.
But, you may say, Putin wouldn’t repeat Hitler’s gambit and risk WWIII by escalating his invasion of Ukraine on such a flimsy basis as this attack on the Moscow theater, would he?
After all, the world knows that he had advance warning and the attackers were from ISIS-K. Would any world leader think he could lie his own people into war just for his own political benefit?
Consider, though, the recent experience of our own country.
In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.
Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little 3- day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected (if you did it right) and have a two-term presidency:
“I'll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004, as I noted in a recent Daily Take.
“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.
“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.’”
In the fall of 2001, the US government received multiple warnings that something like what would become 9/11 was coming. Some came from foreign governments, others from within our own intelligence agencies.
On August 6th, 2001, the CIA was so alarmed that they flew an agent all the way down to Crawford, Texas in a private jet just to hand-deliver a memo to Bush that was titled:
“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
Bush’s response to the possibility of Washington DC being a terrorist target was to change his plans to return and instead take the longest vacation in the history of the presidency. He flew went from Crawford, Texas to Florida, a state run by his brother, where Jeb declared a state of emergency on August 24th. George stayed there, refusing to return to DC until after the attacks were over.
The attack on 9/11 gave Bush his first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” when our guy Osama Bin Laden, who the Reagan/Bush administration had spent $3 billion building up in Afghanistan, engineered an attack on New York and DC.
The crime was planned in Germany and Florida and on 9/11 Bin Laden was, according to CBS News, not even in Afghanistan:
“CBS Evening News has been told that the night before the Sept. 11 terrorists attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.”
When the Obama administration finally caught and killed Bin Laden, he was again in Pakistan, the home base for the Taliban.
The Washington Post headline weeks after 9/11 put it succinctly: “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer On Bin Laden.” With that decision not to arrest and try Bin Laden for his crime but instead to go to war, George W. Bush set the US and Afghanistan on a direct path to disaster (but simultaneously set himself up for re-election in 2004 as a “wartime president”).
And then there’s the October attack by Hamas on Israel.
Press reports suggest that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, like Bush and Putin, received warnings from multiple countries prior to the October 7th attacks and, like Putin, Bush, and Hitler, chose to ignore them. He didn’t even activate military or civilian police units in the regions immediately adjacent to Gaza, where the attacks could easily be expected to occur.
Netanyahu then used the atrocities associated with those attacks to launch an unprecedented and largely indiscriminate bombing attack on Gaza, killing over 30,000 civilians and destroying most of the region’s housing and hospital infrastructure.
So far it’s kept him in office and out of prison.
Thus, in summary, Putin using this attack as the premise to launch a massive war would be nothing new — and not even something unique to dictatorships.
This theater attack is certainly a larger provocation than the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 that tripped off World War I.
Which brings us to the doomsday scenario that Putin may be contemplating right now, emboldened as he’s been by Trump and House Republicans preventing any further US aid to Ukraine for a year-and-a-half.
Like Hitler, Netanyahu, and Bush all did, Putin just claimed that up is down, that the terrorist attack he knew was coming was an unprovoked surprise, and that it came from Ukraine, not ISIS-K.
Just hours ago he declared of the terrorists:
“They were trying to hide and were moving toward Ukraine. … Based on preliminary information, a window for crossing the border was prepared for them by the Ukrainian side.”
Putin added that he would “punish” those “responsible” for the attack after the weekend period of mourning is over.
Ukraine, of course, has denied any involvement or knowledge of the attack. But don’t be surprised if Putin uses this as an excuse to massively bomb Kiev the way he utterly destroyed Grozny the capital of Chechnya, to subdue that nation. The attacks could begin as early as this coming week.
If that happens, it could provoke a stronger response from EU countries who see Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Moldova as being next on Putin’s menu: both he and his spokesmen have already said as much.
And that could lead to a major escalation of the Ukraine war beyond the borders of Ukraine and into Poland or the Baltics, triggering Nato’s Article 5 mutual defense provision, which would instantaneously draw the US directly into the conflict.
All because Republicans have convinced Putin that they can prevent further US aid, so he believes now is a good time to use the time-tested “pretext of an unexpected attack” strategy to go from a “military operation” to an all-out war.
In fact, just yesterday afternoon his official spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that the country is now officially “at war.”
That Ukrainian conflict, particularly if Putin-aligned Republicans like Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc. are able to continue to prevent the US from helping Ukraine push Russia into a stalemate, could make China’s dictator Xi Jinping think it’s a great time to attack Taiwan.
And that, particularly since we recently stationed troops on Taiwanese territory, throws us straight into WWIII, regardless of Republican obstructionism and isolationist rhetoric.
I hope I’m wrong. Praying, frankly, that I’m wrong.
Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Anthony Blinken must have a hellacious job today…
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