Barack Obama Abandons Missile Defense Shield in Europe

Watch the neo cons go nuts. This move by Obama could be simple economics. Or it could recognize the reality that missile shields don't work, have never worked, and never will work. This article mentions the slow development of Iran's long range missile program as a possible reason. Why would Iran want to shoot a missile at Poland? Even when the U.S. makes the right decision the tortured logic illustrates how difficult it is for the U.S. to make any decisions that don't kowtow to the neo cons.

Peacenik awaits a Frank Gaffney article calling Obama a traitor. Peacenik awaits a Limbaugh report calling Obama an appeaser. Peacenik awaits a Glenn Beck editorial calling Obama a commie. Oh wait. Beck has already done that. Wonder what Henry, the war criminal, Kissinger will have to say.

Decision likely to delight Moscow, which saw itself as the target, but is met with dismay by Poland and Czech Republic

by Luke Harding in Moscow and Ian Traynor in Brussels

A demonstrator puts on a hat with a picture of a missile during a demonstration outside the U.S. embassy in central Warsaw, March 24, 2007. (REUTERS/Katarina Stoltz)

Barack Obama has abandoned the controversial Pentagon plan to build a missile defence system in Europe. The move has prompted angry accusations of betrayal from Washington's eastern European allies but delighted the Kremlin.

In one of the sharpest breaks yet with the policies of the Bush administration, Obama phoned the leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic last night to tell them that he had dropped plans to site missile interceptors and a radar station in their respective countries. Russia had furiously opposed the project, claiming it targeted Moscow's nuclear arsenal.

Obama is to announce the reversal officially at a news conference today. This morning the Czech prime minister, Jan Fischer, revealed that Obama phoned him about it last night.

Read on...

Cold War Déjà-Vu

by Mike Gravel

In his speech in Prague, President Obama's rhetoric was essentially no different than that of George Bush. He promised, because of our "moral responsibility," to rid the world of nuclear weapons. He then averred that the US would not lower its defenses while others are pursuing a nuclear threat.

He's right about his last promise. Under his budget the US will continue to spend on defense (and a nuclear capability) more than all the rest of the world put together, "While others are pursuing a nuclear threat" an obvious reference to Iran, which our intelligence community reports is not pursuing a nuclear weapon. Obama who knows this intelligence information said to a cheering crowd: "As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven." So much for his recent peaceful overtures to the people of Iran whose defense budget is less than 1% of ours.

"Cost-effective!!!" The missile shield is the biggest boondoggle in military history with constant cost overruns. "Proven!!!" All tests have failed save one where the target's location was programmed into the interceptor guidance system. The President's false exaggerations are statements right out of a lobbyist's briefing paper. The missile shield in Alaska was deployed before the system was ever proven to work at a cost of $100 billion. The shield for Poland and Czech will cost more than $100 billion. The great majority of knowledgeable scientists, not on the payroll of the benefiting defense contractors, state that the system will not work and that a threat does not exist.

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punditman says...
Ah yes, missile defence. Punditman is having an early 80s flashback.

The idea of a missile "shield" has always been misleading, dating back to Reagan's SDI. According to assistant professor Tom Sauer at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and professor Dave Webb of Leeds Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, "it is a solution that technically does not work being applied to a problem that does not actually exist...The systems cannot effectively target incoming missiles without assistance from homing devices."

As the above piece by Mike Gavel points out, missile "defence" is not so much a defense against incoming enemy missiles as it is an "offense" in that it seeks to knock out enemy communications leaving them blind and vulnerable to a first strike. Moreover, missile defence is not a stabilizing influence; it is destabilizing, because when one country develops any weapons systems, whether deemed "offensive" or "defensive," it inevitably spawns more weapons systems from other countries. Nor is missile defence cheap; it will only lead to a new expensive arms race in space that the world can ill afford, while lining the pockets of Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and the rest of the military industrial complex.

So once again, most of what you hear is propaganda, meant to benefit the few while endangering and impoverishing the many.

NATO Backs Missile Shield Over Russian Protest

www.antiwar.com

NATO foreign ministers today praised America’s planned missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic as making a “substantial contribution” to protecting Europe from long-range ballistic missiles.

The United States insists that the shield is primarily directed at the threat of long-range Iranian missiles, though both the missile base and the radar station are well outside the range of Iran’s most advanced missile. Rather, Russia sees the bases and the 10 interceptor missiles to be placed there sometime in the next few years as an effort to slightly degrade their retaliatory capability.

President-elect Barack Obama has not yet committed to completing the base, saying he would do so only if the technology is proven workable. Russia has responded to the plan by threatening to place Iskander missiles and jamming equipment in the exclave of Kaliningrad to counter the shield. President Medvedev says his government is willing to reverse the decision to place the missiles in Kaliningrad if Obama cancels construction of the missile defense.

punditman says...

As senior citizens' savings evaporate into a firepit of financial ruin, as the credit crisis deepens and unemployment creeps upwards, why this is just what we need: another arms race based on a massively expensive technology that doesn't work and serves only to increase tensions with the Kremlin. How does the US/NATO expect the Russians to react? Just sit there and take it on the chin?

It kind of reminds me of the Canadian Parliament. What did Harper expect the opposition to do after he tried to cut them off at the knees? The art of compromise seems to have been expunged from political discourse.

The US Missile Defence System Is the Magic Pudding That Will Never Run Out

Poland is just the latest fall guy for an American foreign policy dictated by military industrial lobbyists in Washington

by George Monbiot

It’s a novel way to take your own life. Just as Russia demonstrates what happens to former minions that annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this proposal by offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system.

The American government insists that the interceptors, which will be stationed on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their purpose is to defend Europe and the US against the intercontinental ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don’t possess. This is why they are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in Texas knows, shares a border with both rogue states

Read on...

Peacenik enjoyed this George Monbiot article about the U.S. missile defense system. Peacenik has been following this boondoggle for years. Professor Ted Postol, an MIT physicist, has made a career out of debunking the missile shield. The missile defense system does not work. It has not been successfully tested. It is welfare for the military industrial complex. But countries hosting this boondoggle do place a target on themselves for that favorite neo-con boogey man......Russia.

Mikhail Gorbachev has accused the United States of mounting an imperialist conspiracy against Russia that could push the world into a new Cold War.

AP

Mikhail Gorbachev: conspiracy

With Dmitry Medvedev due to be inaugurated today as Russian president, the Soviet Union's last leader said that the White House's claims of peaceful intentions towards its former superpower rival could no longer be trusted.

Delivering one of his most scathing attacks on the US, Mr Gorbachev told The Daily Telegraph that a US military build-up was under way to contain a resurgent Russia.

From Nato's expansion plans in the former Soviet Union to Washington's proposals for a bigger defence budget and a missile shield in central Europe, the US was deliberately quashing hopes for permanent peace with Russia, Mr Gorbachev said.

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punditman says...Gorby makes some good points. And if the Bush administration can't even see eye-to-eye with a guy that even Reagan liked, what does that tell us about their mindsets? And how would the US react if, in this post-cold war era, Russia decided to encircle the US with military bases and a missile shield by cajoling friendly allies?

Hmmm...look what happened last time Russia responded to American encirclement à la Cuba missile crisis (we're lucky we aren't a radically-reduced population of radioactive mutants, foraging to survive on a glowing landscape.)