Among the first things that President Obama will have to decide when he assumes office is whether to continue President Bush’s and the Pentagon’s plans to install missile interceptors in Eastern Europe. Let’s hope that he rejects those plans. Otherwise, all that will be accomplished will be to increase tensions with Russia, which, not surprisingly, will provide the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex with new excuses to increase their perpetually ever-growing budgets.
Weighing into the controversy, Air Force Gen. Henry A. Obering III, director of the Missile Defense Agency, stated that American interests would be “severely hurt” if Obama decides to abandon the project.
Obering is wrong. What would be hurt are the interests of the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, which depend on ever-present crises and tensions to justify their ever-increasing requests for ever-more taxpayer money.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials in the Bush administration continue to maintain, with straight faces, that the missile interceptors are intended to protect Eastern Europe from an attack from … Iran! Never mind that Iran isn’t mobilizing to attack and invade Eastern Europe, the United States, or anywhere else.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has already threatened that if the missile interceptors are installed, Russia will respond with the installation of missiles on the Russian-Polish borders. He has said that if the U.S. abandons its plans, so will Russia.
That prompted Defense Secretary Robert Gates to call the Russian threat a misguided attempt that harkens back to the Cold War era. Gates also said that NATO, whose original mission was to protect Europe from Soviet aggression, will expand membership to Ukraine, another move that Russia naturally opposes.
Madeleine Albright, who served as secretary of state in the Clinton regime and who is now serving as a member of Obama’s transition team, suggested that Medvedev’s opposition to the U.S. government’s missile project made it appear that he was “anti-American.” In conflating the federal government and the country, Albright makes a mistake that is common to both Republicans and Democrats. In fact, her statement brings to mind her former boss Bill Clinton’s famously incorrect assertion that one cannot both love his country and hate the wrongdoing of his government. After all, if the federal government and the country are the same thing, why does the Bill of Rights expressly protect the country from the federal government?
Commentators are saying that Medvedev’s threat has made the situation more difficult for Obama. If Obama abandons the missile project, it will appear as if he crumbled in the face of the Russian threat, they say.
Wouldn’t it be nice if a U.S. president didn’t worry about such things and instead simply did what he knows to be right? Wouldn’t it be nice if Obama were to say something like this:
“The missile interceptors will not be installed in Eastern Europe. I can understand why the Russian regime would consider this a provocative act. If Russia were installing the same type of system in Cuba or in Mexico along the U.S. border, that would concern us. Such a project will accomplish nothing more than to increase tensions unnecessarily between our two countries, which it is already succeeding in doing. It’s time we reduced such tensions, especially given the urgent need to decrease U.S. federal spending, including on the military. While we’re on the subject, given that NATO’s mission of protecting Europe from Soviet attack expired with the fall of the Berlin Wall, isn’t it time to dismantle NATO rather than expand it?”
Given Obama’s campaign promise of change, a great place to begin changing things for the better would be the cancellation of the Bush regime’s missile interceptor project in Eastern Europe. While the cancellation of the project would run counter to the interests of the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, it would definitely be in the interests of the American people.