White House to Scrap Bush’s Approach to Missile Shield
By PETER BAKER
WASHINGTON — President Obama announced on Thursday that he would scrap former President George W. Bush’s planned missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic and instead deploy a reconfigured system aimed more at intercepting short- and medium-range Iranian missiles.
Mr. Obama decided not to deploy a sophisticated radar system in the Czech Republic or 10 ground-based interceptors in Poland, as Mr. Bush had planned. Instead, the new system his administration is developing would deploy smaller SM-3 missiles, at first aboard ships and later on land somewhere in Europe, possibly even in Poland or the Czech Republic.
“President Bush was right that Iran’s ballistic missile program poses a significant threat,” Mr. Obama told reporters at the White House. But he said new assessments of the nature of the Iranian threat required a different system that would use existing technology and different locations. “This new approach will provide capabilities sooner, build on proven systems and offer greater defenses against the threat of missile attack than the 2007 European missile defense program.”
The decision amounts to one of the biggest national security reversals by the new administration, one that has caused consternation in Poland and the Czech Republic and pleased at least some officials in Russia, which had adamantly objected to the Bush plan. But Obama administration officials stressed that they are not abandoning missile defense, only redesigning it to meet the more immediate Iranian threat.
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"We're not gonna deploy missile defense in Poland; instead..."
"We're not gonna deploy missile defense in Poland; instead... we'll deploy missile defense in Poland. We'll just use smaller, older missiles." Dude is really getting on my nerves with his miltary lies. He says "Bush was right"... come on now. Who in Europe is being "threatened" by Iran? Over what? He says they'll build on "proven systems"... like what? All of the missile defense tests they've allowed the public to know about have been abject failures.
If this is one of the "biggest national security reversals" as the NY Times claims, that's clearly not saying much. And again, what is this "immediate Iranian threat?" The only saber-rattling I've heard has been coming from this side of the Atlantic.
Brilliant move, maybe even qualifies as a head fake
Can't speak for the timing...
...but in terms of the stated focus (Iran) it can't be denied by certain parties (viz., Israel) that their concerns over Iran are not being taken into account. Meanwhile, it's less than an overwhelming show of U.S. force, which signals to Iran that we're not talking scorched-earth policy, which we can't afford these days anyway. In addition, it gives the Navy a strong role (to the delight of Joint Chiefs head Admiral Mike Mullen). The only ones who have cause for complaint are some defense contractors and the Republicans who already don't like anything Obama does.
The only ones who have cause
The defense policy establishment is not happy with this decision. The consensus voice of this establishment, the New York Times, ran a piece today featuring the views of six alleged foreign policy experts none of whom supported the decision to not place missiles in Poland. This effort to once again encircle Russia with nuclear missiles is deliberately provocative and scary. It was our placement of nuclear missiles around almost the entire perimeter of the former Soviet Union that actually spurred the Soviets, more from fear than perfidy, to attempt placing similar weapons in Cuba. We never learn.
Every President Needs A War Of His Own
Every President Needs A War Of His Own
William Pfaff
Paris, September 15, 2009 – The more one hears the discussion among Democrats about the war in Afghanistan the more one feels that it is a serious handicap that Barack Obama has no personal experience of international relations or of foreign policy or military service, beyond such experience as one gains as a first term U.S. senator.
His vice president, Joseph Biden has a great deal of legislative experience in these matters, and knows a lot about foreign affairs, but from hearing him speak and reading what he has written I feel no confidence in his judgement, which seems entirely the conventional wisdom of the policy community and the newspaper editorial pages, with nothing original or questioning in it.
That is to say, Senator Biden knows everything about America’s foreign relations, but it only adds up to all that “everybody knows,” and the United States is not in a situation today that recommends a discredited conventional wisdom as a guide to future policy.
On Afghanistan, there seems to be no coherent reason or vision as to why we are there. To “catch” Osama bin Laden, ten years after his crime? But you don’t have to take control of a country of 250 thousand square miles and 3l million people in order to catch a terrorist leader. (Especially when it is taken for granted that he actually is in Pakistan.) You don’t have to take it upon yourself to solve Afghanistan’s internal social problems or to “defeat” (how, no one knows) the Taliban military, political and religious uprising in the country. What has that really to do with Americans?
good decision...not like those missiles were going to deter
Mr. PUTIN, who WILL be back in power[FORMALLY- we all know he's 'The Man' behind the scenes right now ] before the next election in America.
Barack Obama: Entangled Giant
Entangled Giant - The New York Review of Books
Garry Willis
“George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change, and it was clear where change was needed. Illegal acts should cease—torture and indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus and legal representation, unilateral canceling of treaties, defiance of Congress and the Constitution, nullification of laws by signing statements. Powers attributed to the president by the theory of the unitary executive should not be exercised. Judges who are willing to give the president any power he asks for should not be confirmed.
“But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.
“The truth of this was borne out in the early days of Barack Obama's presidency. At his confirmation hearing to be head of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that "extraordinary rendition"—the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries—was a tool he meant to retain.[1] Obama's nominee for solicitor general, Elena Kagan, told Congress that she agreed with John Yoo's claim that a terrorist captured anywhere should be subject to "battlefield law."[2] On the first opportunity to abort trial proceedings by invoking "state secrets"—the policy based on the faulty Reynolds case—Obama's attorney gen- eral, Eric Holder, did so.[3] Obama refused to release photographs of "enhanced interrogation." The CIA had earlier (illegally) destroyed ninety-two videotapes of such interrogations—and Obama refused to release documents describing the tapes...[4]”
“Some were dismayed to see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium. Leon Panetta at the CIA especially puzzled those who had known him during the Clinton years. A former CIA official told The Washington Post, "Leon Panetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for the interrogation program in the first place." A White House official told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, ‘It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’”