ISIS Attack on Moscow?

“To the man who only has a hammer everything he encounters begins to look like a nail”.                                                                     

Abraham Maslow

On Friday, ISIS terrorists attacked a concert hall in Moscow, killing upwards of 140 people.

Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the Russian people on Saturday claiming that the terrorists were under arrest and that they had been planning to escape to Ukraine.

He will try anything to involve Ukraine in this attack and make Russia appear a victim of Ukrainian duplicity, even after massacring tens of thousands of Ukrainian men, women, and children in massive air attacks on that country over the past two years.

Since every object of Putin’s hammer must be the nail of Ukraine, every weapon in his propaganda arsenal must point to Ukrainian aggression.

Putin’s attempt to paint Ukraine as the culprit aims at making Russians the victims of so-called Ukrainian terrorism and give the global audience an opportunity to feel sorry for Russians after the disaster they have visited on Ukraine and Ukrainians.

Putin must now explain to Russians why he took no action when the U.S. advised Russian authorities and the Russian public last Tuesday that an attack was imminent. In a speech Wednesday, Putin called the U.S. intelligence warning a lie and a provocation aimed at dividing Russians and creating fear and apprehension among the Russian public.

Putin mentioned none of this in his address on Saturday, but it is already public knowledge, and Russians will see through Putin’s duplicity and incompetence in managing valuable intelligence that could have saved many lives.

This underscores Putin’s fragile sense of paranoia and his inability to accept intelligence from non-allied sources even if they might save Russian lives.

Indeed, there are now unsubstantiated reports that the Russian security service (FSB) may have hired the terrorists to provide Putin with a cause to unite Russians after the assassination of Alexei Navalny. The attackers had false Ukrainian licence plates on the vehicle supplied to them by the person who provided them with Russian documents and payment for their actions, according to one of the terrorists interrogated publicly after his arrest.

This would not be the first time that Putin and the FSB carry out a massacre of Russians to support Putin’s political career.

According to Radio Free Europe, one month after then-President Boris Yeltsin plucked a security agency official named Vladimir Putin from obscurity and made him prime minister in 1999, an explosion leveled a nine-story apartment building on Moscow’s outskirts.

The predawn blast on September 9, 1999, reduced the building to a smoking pile of rubble, killing more than 100. A second building, less than 6 kilometers away, was rocked by an explosion on September 13, killing 119.

On September 23 of that year, Putin asserted terrorists in Chechnya were to blame and ordered a massive air campaign within the North Caucasus region.

To this day, some observers are convinced that the entire episode was orchestrated by the FSB to ensure Putin’s election.

Putin may well have needed this terrorist attack to change the international narrative around his electoral “victory” in last week’s presidential election and to counter international opprobrium for his vicious attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine.

While ISIS may be the culprit, one cannot rule out a “Muslims for hire” cause for this despicable act.

Whether leaders are democratic or dictatorial, there is always the possibility that their obsession with a nailing a target will lead them to shape any information at hand to fit their narrative.

Two moments in recent history underscore this phenomenon.

After the attacks on the twin towers in New York on 9/11, President George W. Bush and his immediate entourage tried every way possible to implicate Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. This because President Bush blamed the Iraqi president for trying to assassinate his father, President George H.W. Bush.

The Bush administration went so far as to fabricate false accusations of weapons of mass destruction and inventing meetings between Iraqi diplomats and Al Qaeda terrorists knowing full well that Saddam and Al Qaeda shared a mutual loathing of each other.

The result was that the U.S. lost all credibility, Secretary of State Colin Powell was publicly humiliated, and his impeccable reputation irrevocably compromised. Saddam was toppled by a U.S. invasion that led to the destruction of Iraq as a viable state, drove it into Iran’s arms, and saw the birth of ISIS and all the damage it has caused since its founding.

As well, by concentrating on Iraq and eliminating U.S. forces from Afghanistan, Bush’s decision contributed to the resurgence of the Taliban and the disastrous state in which Afghanistan currently finds itself.

The similar moment in history took place on March 11, 2004, in Madrid.

A terrorist attack killed dozens of people in a series of coordinated bombings. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar was fighting a tough electoral race along with his Partido Popular (PP). He publicly blamed the attack on the Basque terrorist organization ETA. Since his main opposition were calling for negotiations with the Basque independentistas, the hammer of ETA complicity seemed to fit Aznar’s political narrative.

Unfortunately for Aznar and the PP, only hours after the attack it became public knowledge that the perpetrators were Islamist terrorists. Aznar was left looking foolish, Spaniards were angry that their government had blatantly lied to them, and his party consequently lost the election.

The lesson for all leaders regardless of their political persuasion is that sooner or later the truth is known. Trying to use a human tragedy to further a political aim through deception and subterfuge is bad politics.

It will be interesting how Putin reacts once Russians begin questioning his accusations of Ukrainian involvement in this terrorist act and how they will react to this lie.

Some observers may claim that Putin has Russians under full control and that this reaction on his part will not result in destabilizing the Russian Federation.

I am not so sure.

After repeated attacks by Ukrainian forces on Russian petroleum refineries, this attack may leave many Russians feeling more vulnerable than ever, and less believing in what used to be Putin’s aura of invincibility.

By trying to change the narrative of Islamist terrorism to one of Ukrainian involvement, Putin may well have changed the perception of his leadership in the minds of many Russians.

As we know, in politics, perception is vital, and today Putin’s reputation is suffering.