Unless I'm mistaken no one in the Horde has every taken the slightest shred of responsibility for the Wrath Gate or made even the smallest apology. Also, no one in the Horde has ever even tried to claim it wasn't their fault. Cirumstances all make it appear pre-planned. The plague wasn't dropped until after Saurfang bit it - as if it was plan B all along. Yeah it killed some grunts - acceptable losses if it killed the Lich King and a ton of Alliance.

So Varian beats down Putress, then shows up in the Undercity Throne Room, starts to go all wiggy, threatens Thrall, and is teleported out. Not even a single "It wasn't our fault" from Thrall. No quests or flavour text from quests hinting that he may have even tried to communicate "It wasn't our fault."

If another country (in this case the faction of The Horde) has a small sub-section commit an atrocity and doesn't say anything, the assumption is they condone it. Their silence speaks volumes.

If a <citizen of country X> performs a terrorist act against {country Y}, it's normally barely hours before politicians or the recognized leader of <country X> makes a statement against terrorism and gives public assurance this will be stopped/never happen again. An advisor of {country Y} telling leader of {country Y} "Look, it's all a mistake" is simply not going to cut it if <country X> doesn't say a word.

Jaina is just such an advisor and the Horde have been mute.

Did the Horde intend to kill the Alliance and start a war? No.
Does the Horde condone this action? No (or Varimathras would have gotten pats on the back).
But unless they communicate this fact, the political reality is both questions are effectively "Yes."

Regardless of whether Varian's a dick or Garrosh is running rampant - if they two factions don't bother to talk then actions are going to continue to speak louder than words, and say all the wrong things.

This is exactly how I see it. All this talk about the RAS being a separate faction etc. is just...well, silly from the Alliance point of view.

Let's paint it in a different light. Consider the Wrathgate the battle of Normandy. The British and American forces are storming the beaches when suddenly, what's that? A bunch of Russian transports show up and they join the fray. Yay, joined against a common foe! Sudden, Rasputin shows up and unleashes some new nerve gas he's come up with, it kills most everyone, and the assault on Normandy fails.

Stalin shows up, claims "Doh, I'm leader of the Russian forces, but I had no idea Rasputin was a bad guy all this time."

So, giving him the benefit of the doubt, an American/British strike force parachutes into Moscow and takes down Rasputin. On the way, they discover buildings where horrific experiments are being done on British and American soldiers/civilians. Stalin claims "lol I had no idea this was going on." Ok, relations are pretty chilly at this point.

Then, the British and American forces are winning the Battle of the Bulge, when Russians come out from behind them and slaughter them, allowing the Germans to rally and slaughter the Russians in turn.

At this point, would you want to ally with the Russians? How can you think any joint venture with them has a higher chance of success than working alone? Imagine reading about the above in the papers then reading that Stalin didn't know what was going on under his nose...could you possibly believe it? Sure, sure, WE know that Putress was a rogue faction (um, who was working on a plague because Sylvanas asked him to...but yeah, right, retconned into entirely rogue and separate from innocent Sylvanas). Varimathas betrayed them...then again, she did knowingly ally with a dreadlord, I mean sure Stormwind was ruled by Onyxia but at least that was because they were duped into thinking she was human. But the experiments ongoing in Undercity? That alone going on within the capital city of one of the Horde factions is reason enough to go to war. And she cannot claim ignorance of it, she ORDERED it to begin with (even if she'd like us to forget about that), and not knowing about it is just not a reasonable lie (she's close enough to hear the screaming).

And if Thrall doesn't know? He's the leader of the Horde, as such he is responsible for NOT knowing. He has refused to take responsibility and make a real effort to make amends with the Alliance.

The attack in Icecrown is just craven though. There is no chance I would trust the Horde after that. How can they even think to talk of a joint attack on the Scourge when, seeing the Alliance giving it to Arthas's armies their first instinct is to attack the Alliance from behind? Then, with their dying breaths, ask heroes (PCs) of their faction to make sure the wounded Alliance around them are dead...

Sorry. I know full well the Horde have their own side to the story. And they see it as not their fault. And while everything other than the attack in Icecrown can be explained, at best those explanations stretch believability for the players that can read them. From the Alliance point of view, Varian is only doing what he must.

As far as his last line in the Ulduar trailer, when he says the death god can take them, I assumed he was talking to Thrall and Garrosh. If he is going to ignore that threat completely, then he is certainly in the wrong.

Quite frankly, Thrall is coming off worse and worse here. He has no idea what his allies are doing...if he was unaware of the RAS, what other nefarious schemes are going on that he knows nothing about? Then people like Garrosh within his faction aren't kept in line at all. He needs to clean house and get his chain of command in order. There's a time for diplomacy, and there's a time to lay the smack down and let the Horde know who is in charge. If he could have won the duel with Garrosh that happened just before Wrath hit, he should have. Laid him out cold. That would take Garrosh down a notch and let those among the Orcs clinging to the old ways of choosing a leader know that they should respect him. He didn't win, and looked to observers to be losing...that only hurts his ability to lead, and was a very bad decision if he was holding back.

Getting away from the "who has the moral highground post-wrathgate" debate... What I took away from the video was that neither faction were going to worry about Ulduar in any official capacity. Both sides were content to fight each other and Arthas and no accord would be made to take down YS like was made for Illidan for example. The end when it says "who will face the old god?" (I'm paraphrasing) pretty much implies it ins't going to be the horde or the alliance let alone a combination of the two. That leaves only the player to pick up the slack. I always felt that PCs are members of factions in name only. We are adventurers, not soldiers. Whenever we get a quest it isn't "Private Cobs your orders are to help retake this tower from the humans" it's more like "Cobs, my troops are taxed fighting the alliance forces, you might be able to sway the battle if you kill 15 footmen". It's not being a part of the institutions of the factions that gives us (and explains) our self-determination in the game. We can choose, despite the Kro'Korn(sp?) and Knights of Stormwind deciding not to, to assault Ulduar at the behest of Rhonin and Alexstrazsa.

I mean we assumed 1 of 2 things, that it was either Arthas being tortued by Ner'zhul, or Arthas torturing Bolvar.

Do we reallllly need that 100% confirmation? :P