Saturday Diplomacy: Missile Defense

This week, the Obama administration announced a change in missile defense strategy for Eastern Europe.  The right wing press and opinion hawks went (sorry for the pun) ballistic.  The people who were against making this change are a bunch of retro armchair generals insisting on fighting the Cold War over again.  Their position seems to be that any program that is utterly ill conceived and doomed to fail yet which antagonizes Russia is way, way, way better than a program that has way, way, way better odds of achieving its stated mission while not antagonizing Russia.  Does anyone really think that George Bush’s abyssmal poll numbers in his later days had nothing to do with his foreign policy?  Mr. Bolton, exit stage right.

I found this Kos article that does a nice job of proving that this change wasn’t some unilateral withdrawal as Drudge and others would have you believe.  I watched the Pentagon press conference about it.  Actually, reading the Drudge headlines got my hopes up.  But soon into the press conference I realized the Pentagon was doing what it does best while the press was doing it what it does best.  The only cause for celebration here was that Russia is generally open to the idea.

I’m happy about improved US-Russia relations.  But I’ve never been happy about this missile defence deployment in Europe.  The threat, we are supposed to believe is from Iran.  It is true that Iran has missile capability.  But I’m scratching my head wondering where I can find all the threatening talk Iran has made against Poland and the Czech Republic.  I mean I often read stories where Ahmadinejad talks about the “ending” Israel.  But I’ve been darned to find any speech where his hate has extended to the Poles or Czechs.

Well, I don’t have a doctorate in missile defense.  So obviously I need to go along with the notion that if someone has a missile with a certain range, they must mean to strike the country that we say they mean to strike within that range.  It therefore makes total sense for our country to deploy a missile defense for that county even though that country’s populace has not ‘ratified’ it.  I’m really glad we’re making the improvements in the missile defense.  The world would be so much worse off if we didn’t make these slight adjustments on the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld doctrine now that we voted their asses out of office.