Posted on 01/11/2009 11:00:01 AM PST by lizol
Obama should press forward with missile defense
By E. THOMAS MCCLANAHAN The Kansas City Star
Barack Obama’s first test came pretty quickly. But we still don’t know how he will respond.
The day after the election, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev reiterated Moscow’s threat to place short-range missiles near Poland if the U.S. builds a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.
NATO has endorsed missile defense for Europe. The U.S. and Poland have agreed that missile interceptors will be placed on Polish soil. The question is whether Obama will back away from that in the face of Russian threats.
The answer, so far, is unclear.
Soon after his election, Obama spoke to Russian President Lech Kaczynski, who said he was told the “missile defense project would continue.” But Obama’s transition team issued a statement saying the president-elect had made no such commitment.
The confusion highlights Obama’s tendency to straddle the missile-defense issue.
In a debate with Sen. John McCain, he said, “I actually believe that we need missile defense, because of Iran and North Korea and the potential for them to obtain or to launch nuclear weapons.” But he also has pledged to “cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.”
As his transition team put it, Obama supports a missile defense system “when the technology is proved to be workable.”
This is the favored language of missile-defense skeptics or outright opponents. Of course it has to be workable. Who’s in favor of an unworkable system?
The problem is, missile defense is a system of systems, and the way to test it is to develop it. It has to be built before it can be tested. The same thing applied to the Global Positioning System.
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
For some strange reason, liberals are for missile defense. Suddenly. I’m sure it has nothing to do with politics....
Obama will take it down, or will negoiatate some sort of agreement which allows Moscow and Beijing to see the technology as an agreement for setting up the system.
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