This Big Dog Will Act, If You Rattle His Cage...

The rebels, the separatists, the majority, the ruling party... who can keep them all straight?  And whose side are we on anyway?

I do know this:  I hope the president is working Sundays.
I think many realistic Americans -- despite the macho bravado/a policy actions of the past few administrations -- understand that we use force sparingly, but wisely.

If we can't work with our allies now, and the U.N.,
to immediately send in an elite team of militarily trained rescue units to this territory, to bring back all the bodies/body parts of passengers found on the ground from the shot-down plane, why do we even play at being soldiers?  Now is the time.  This is appropriate.  In and out.  Mission defined.  Bring back the bodies.  Negotiate if you must, or else act.  Boom, boom, boom, boom...

Ukrainian emergency responders, working under the watchful eyes of armed rebels, had recovered 196 bodies from the area where Flight 17, a Boeing 777 carrying 298 passengers and crew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed and burned on Thursday afternoon.

But the responders were forced to turn the bodies over to the separatists, Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, said at a briefing in Kiev on Sunday. Mr. Lysenko said officials believed that 38 of those bodies were taken to the morgue in Donetsk, a regional capital that is controlled by separatists.
...
Michael Bociurkiw, the leader of an observer mission from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O.S.C.E.), said that most of the bodies had been placed in three refrigerated railroad cars in the town of Torez, not far from the crash site. He said that monitors were told that 167 bodies were in the cars, which were locked but under the control of rebels from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, one of the main separatist groups.

Monitors were permitted to make a brief inspection, Mr. Bociurkiw said, speaking by phone from eastern Ukraine, and the body bags all appeared to have tags on them. “We were escorted to the railway station by heavily armed guards of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” he said.

“They are the ones in charge of that area.”

National security interest?  A worthy moral cause.
Soldiers don't shoot down civilian planes in accident, and then keep the bodies of non-involved victims.  That's not "war" behavior.  We need not intervene in a Ukraine/Russia civil war between majority and minority factions.  We wouldn't even be taking responsibility for determining the cause.

Simply bring back the bodies.  If our technology and equipment is worth anything, and our diplomatic investments not for naught, America should be able to use a bit of muscle and get this done. Nothing more. Body recovery, whatever it takes.

Even if our soldiers die. This is one mission that we would need not look back on in shame for our country or our troops. In and out. Get 'er done.

Today -- rotting body parts can't wait, and we all know how the talk can drag on and on ... while people sit on the sidelines and wait.

Secretary of State John Kerry in a telephone conversation on Saturday with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey S. Lavrov, urged Russia to help control the situation at the crash scene and help put an end to the insurrection in east Ukraine by pressing rebels to lay down arms.

“The Secretary particularly stressed the international call for investigators to receive full, immediate, and unfettered access to the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash site,” the State Department said, describing Mr. Kerry’s remarks,

“The United States is also very concerned about reports that the remains of some victims and debris from the site are being tampered with or inappropriately removed from the site,” the department added.

In a statement on Saturday,
the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, whose country lost 193 of its citizens aboard the plane, urged the speedy return of bodies and expressed outrage at the lack of control over the site.

“Swift recovery of the victims’ remains is now an absolute necessity and our highest priority,” Mr. Rutte said in the statement.