There is a joke, of sorts, about a wife discovering her husband in bed with another woman. Though the evidence is clearly at hand, the man relies on aggressive assertion as a defense. "What, dear? Of course there's no other woman here."
He smiles. The mistress leaves. The wife, somewhat befuddled, says she must have been mistaken. These days, the Ukrainian people must feel like the wronged wife. From the outside, it often appears a ludicrous exercise in flimflam.
For a defense, this suspension of belief tactic was common in Soviet times. Though a radioactive cloud blew over much of Europe, officials in Moscow in 1986 denied for several days that a nuclear disaster had occurred at Chernobyl.
The linchpin of this defense is a variation on the famous Abraham Lincoln quote. Yes, they said, you can fool all the people all the time. Some of us thought this aggressive assertion tact was swept into the dustbin of history. It wasn't.
The recent manifestation of this is the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's claim that a cargo plane flying over the Congo had its back hatch accidentally thrown open in mid-flight, and it landed without incident, nary a death, nary a body sucked into the air.
This was said with a straight face, even though authorities in Congo have been saying the figure of lives lost was between 14 and 130, though the numbers keep changing. Neither nation can withstand credibility tests, but obviously there were deaths.
This fog of confusion was aided, it appeared, by the Congolese. The plane didn't have a passenger manifest, so there was no way to know exactly how many people were aboard. A military spokesperson in Congo did confirm that seven bodies were recovered.
However, Ukraine Defense Ministry Spokesperson Kostiantyn Khyvrenko, citing the word he received from the state-owned Ukrainian Cargo Airways, said: "Neither the people, nor the cargo, nor the plane itself were hurt or damaged."
With those words, Kostiantyn entered into a heated contest for The Academy Award for Misinformation with the former and comical Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Al Sahhaf, who proclaimed as Baghdad was falling that "we will slaughter them all."
Another recent example had to do with whether Ukraine was or was not in the so-called "coalition of the willing." For home consumption, the government insisted it was not a part of the coalition, while telling the Americans and Brits that, of course, it was.
More accurately, perhaps, was that Ukraine was in a coalition of maybes, or the coalition of convenience, depending on who asked the question.
Having served as a Senator's press secretary, I can imagine that the spokesperson for Ukraine was living through a nightmare. Anything he said was volatile - anyway he said it. During the height of former U.S. President Clinton's travails over his mistress, Monica Lewinsky, his press secretary was asked how he was approaching the controversy.
Mike McCurry replied in a sentence which will go down in the history of presidential press secretaries: "Releasing the truth - slowly."
The malady of obfuscation seems to be epidemic in Ukraine. One recalls the downed tourist plane flying from Israel to Russia, mistakenly knocked from the sky by a Ukrainian SAM missile while troopers were on maneuvers in Crimea.
The first reaction from the Defense Ministry was to stonewall, the second to raise all other possible contingencies, some comical, none plausible. The same scenario was played out when an errant missile landed on an apartment building in Brovary.
A basic tenet of crisis management is to admit wrong when it is obvious that you are in the wrong, a position all of us find ourselves in from time to time. By doing so, one can often take control the dialogue and the messages.
Ukraine's reaction to what are often human failings and mistakes is to start mixing the cement, and see how high it can construct the wall of confusion. All nations from time to time cloud issues, Ukraine dismisses them out of hand as figments of imagination.
Because of this - and even though it might conceivably be true - the country has no credibility when it proclaims advanced radar was not transferred to the Iraqis, and takes stands on other international issues that seem to conflict with evidence.
For the most part, we are practical people who recognize that which is black or white is often gray. Our objection is when told it is actually magenta, and that we are obviously color-blind.
|
