The two nations with the most at stake if it turns out a bomb is what brought down the Metrojet Airbus last week over the Sinai — Egypt and Russia — have been the most ardent in looking for any explanation but a bomb.
Egypt’s motives are pretty obvious: If its security can’t stop something like that, then tourism will stop cold, period. Dependent on tourism for roughly half of its foreign currency reserves, not to mention more than one out of every 20 jobs, Egypt can’t afford that.
Russia’s motives are more covert. And they point straight at President Vladimir Putin.
Far be it for me to psychoanalyze Putin. But let’s go this far, anyway: Those cold eyes, that cold heart, they don’t give us the warm fuzzies — but they aren’t the measures of the man. His actions are. Like Crimea, and Syria. And his inaction too, like Metrojet. Blaming a “terrorist bomb” is simply the last resort for Putin.
That’s because the thinking behind it is, the Islamic State planted a bomb on the Russian plane in retaliation for Russia’s robust swoop into Syria. Russia’s aviation minister scolded Metrojet for asserting that the cause of the crash couldn’t have been either mechanical or human error and must be blamed on “external influence”; there were certainly some strong signs to impugn that assertion, but there were equally strong signs to support it. From holes protruding outward through the fuselage, to Israel’s intercepted Islamic State communications, to the declaration by the Islamic State itself that “We downed it, so die in your rage.” This is hardly a group whose word we trust, but the fact is, they’ve proved themselves smart enough in the past not to make claims they cannot support.
The trouble for Putin is, that’s the last thing in the world he wants his people to believe. His motives for involving Russia in the Middle East mess are many — from protecting Russian assets in Syria to making the United States look impotent to simply getting skin in the game — but from all the reporting I’ve done from Russia, I’m convinced that the single strongest reason is to wave the flag of nationalism, which his people suck up. He reassures them that “We were a superpower once; now we have retaken our rightful place on the world stage.”
And it seems to work. Putin’s newest reported approval rating in Russia, albeit subject to skepticism, is nearly 90 percent.
So although finally last weekend, Putin suspended flights from Russia to Egypt, you can expect that he will only be dragged kicking and screaming to a public conclusion that an Islamic State bomb killed 224 of his kinsmen. None of us should jump to conclusions, but Putin has seemed reluctant for all the wrong reasons.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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