Quote Originally Posted by HoreTore View Post
Is that really a matter of differing mindsets?

The Ukrainians have everything to loose by taking credit, while groups in the mid-east can look to gain from it. If the Ukrainians could gain an advantage by taking credit - do you really think they wouldn't?

See: nationalist romanticizing of utterly brutal warcrimes during the Bosnian war.

Further, I don't see how ISIS would jump at the chance to take credit for the accidental shooting of a plane full of Sunni fundamentalist imams.
One faction or another would. That's the point about Ukraine and other places like that. All sides work roughly in ways that are generally comprehensible to the west. Kill a load of civilians, and no-one will want to take credit for it, and if it involved foreign nationals, then they'll even change operational methods to avoid repeating that in the future (as far as they're able to). However, in the middle east, there will always be factions competing to be as outrageous as possible from our western perspective, so that there is always something to gain for someone to trump the others in alienating them and us. Little we can do in the middle east in our experience results in lasting credit; no matter what we do, there will always be someone looking to be as pointlessly destructive as possible (from our perspective) that will corresponding get them power (which is alien to our understanding of the world). In Ukraine, we can be fairly certain what works and what does not; it's just a matter of whether we're capable and willing.

And as I've said before, I count Israel in the list of middle eastern countries with their alien middle eastern perspectives. They're different mainly because of the influence of what Frag would call lefties: liberals and socialists. If they're ever marginalised or even disappear, Israel would be little different from the other middle eastern countries.