Obama Is Beginning to Sound Like a Cold War Hawk
His comment in Prague should give those Americans who believed in the rhetoric of change serious cause for concern...it sounds like the criminal Bush administration, rather than the campaign promises of Barack Obama.
From the NYTimes coverage of Obama in Prague." 'Let me be clear: Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran’s neighbors and our allies,' Mr. Obama said. 'The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles. As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven.' "
Obama apparently thinks that experts warnings that the US missile defense system is an
horrendously expensive boondoggle, as Frida Berrigan and other have reported.
As she wrote at Tomgram: "While many of the systems described so far are, at least, futures that, in some heated imagination, exist, the misnamed Ballistic Missile Defense System is moving full steam ahead despite being irrelevant, unworkable, and obscenely expensive in our less-than-futuristic present moment. The BMD program got another boost recently when incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave it his full support, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee: 'I know we've spent a lot of money on developing missile defense, but I have believed since the Reagan administration that if we can develop that kind of capability, it would be a mistake for us not to.'
"The mistake is wasting one more dime on decades-worth of failure and bombast that have cost an estimated $200 billion so far without producing a single workable system to shoot down an enemy missile or even the sitting-duck targets that have taken the place of such missiles in half-baked tests of the woeful project.
"Missile defense funding is set to soak up another $9.4 billion in fiscal 2007 -- part of the Pentagon's ongoing corporate welfare system -- and the Defense Department's Future Years Defense Program report proposes that funding averaging $10 billion annually be continued for research and development of the system through… (this is not a misprint) 2024. (The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that annual missile-defense costs will, in fact, increase to $15 billion by 2016.)"
And, of course, President Obama failed to mention the following: "Opposition remains strong, and the polls show clearly that 2/3 of the Czech population are against the installation of the radar...
"It’s obvious that this defence system cannot serve to protect us from Iran or North Korea, and isn’t even useful against Russian or Chinese missiles. Official declaration of the MDA. International military experts confirm that this defence system is totally useless against the thousands of nuclear warheads available to Russia. According to a widely held theory, the real intention of the United States is to militarise and conquer space; and in this way to obtain complete control over this planet. This was the fundamental reason why in 2005, Canada refused to collaborate with the USA, after understanding that this did not involve a system of defence, but a system of attack. (Space4peace.org)"
Unfortunately, it appears that President Obama may be implying the words of former Israel Prime Minister, Levy Eshkol, who once famously said: "I promised, but I did not promise to keep my promises."
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