Friday, July 04, 2008
Rockets Red Glare
Poland: “Not In My Backyard!”
The Poles do not seem to be very keen on Star Wars:
Poland spurned as insufficient on Friday a U.S. offer to boost its air defenses in return for basing anti-missile interceptors on its soil but said it remained open to talks with Washington.
The decision by Poland, a staunch NATO ally, is a setback for the Bush administration drive to counter perceived threats from what Washington calls “rogue states,” particularly Iran.
The Poles are now showing the same kind of resistance to hosting a portion of our strategic defenses as our old NATO allies (West Germany) did when Reagan proposed placing medium range warheads on their soil. The Poles have been reliable allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, so what gives? Follow the money:
Tusk, without disclosing full details, said Washington was proposing to put Patriot batteries on Polish soil for one year.
In the months-long negotiations, Tusk’s center-right government had sought billions of dollars worth of U.S. investment to upgrade Polish air defenses in return for hosting 10 two-stage missile interceptors.
“We are ready to accept proposals or corrections from the American side which would include our proposal to increase (our) security. We can do this in a day, a week, a month,” Tusk said…
“...This is the first time that Poland has said ‘no’ to the U.S. ... It certainly sends a signal to Washington that Poland’s support should not be taken for granted in any circumstances,” said Pawel Swieboda, head of demosEuropa, a Warsaw think tank.
“But it is also the case that the government greatly raised expectations and that these were never very realistic. Poland does need some compensation (for hosting the interceptors) but they went too far in demanding Patriots.”
Clearly, we are still bargaining.
Now, I’m perfectly alright with the concept of ballistic missile defense. It makes sense and there is a chance--a remote one--that some rogue regime may one day fire a few nuclear warheads at a nation we care about. What bothers me about this is that I do not understand why we insist on doing things that are certain to piss off the Russians, who have been quite vocal about their opposition to this plan:
Russia has condemned the missile defense plan as a threat to its own security and has said it will target missiles at Poland and the Czech Republic—its communist-era satellite states—if the deployment goes ahead.
Now, if it is true that Iran is seen as the great threat here, why would Poland be the best place to locate anti-ballistic missiles? Furthermore, why place them in Lithuania if the Poles balk?
The Baltic republic of Lithuania, northeast of Poland, has been suggested as an alternative site for the interceptors.
It is difficult to argue that this is not provocative. I am not a huge fan of Pat Buchanan and his apologism for the Nazis, but I think he is right that we are making a mistake both in expanding NATO to former client states of the USSR and even former Soviet Republics and placing missiles on their territory when it appears to primarily threaten the Russians more than the stated intended targets.
Though the Red Army had picked up and gone home from Eastern Europe voluntarily, and Moscow felt it had an understanding we would not move NATO eastward, we exploited our moment. Not only did we bring Poland into NATO, we brought in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and virtually the whole Warsaw Pact, planting NATO right on Mother Russia’s front porch. Now, there is a scheme afoot to bring in Ukraine and Georgia in the Caucasus, the birthplace of Stalin…
...though Bush sold missile defense as directed at rogue states like North Korea, we now learn we are going to put anti-missile systems into Eastern Europe. And against whom are they directed?
How would we react to a Russian move to put anti-missile missiles on Greenland?Gates says we have been through one Cold War and do not want another. But it is not Moscow moving a military alliance right up to our borders or building bases and planting anti-missile systems in our front and back yards.
First of all, could we only place these missiles in countries that actually want them without requiring billions of dollars of “investments”? Secondly, should we ask NATO allies who are a little closer to Iran and a little further away from Russia to host these missile systems? Perhaps Turkey or Greece or maybe even the one nation that has the most to fear from Iran: Israel.
NATO has already outlived its usefulness with the fall of the Soviet Empire. It is one thing to keep an obsolete organization alive, but another entirely when we seem to actually be using it to revive the problem that it was created to oppose in the first place.
H/T: Drudge