Maine Owl

If Iran did not exist, the U.S. nuclear terror state would have to invent it.

Senator Susan Collins (along with Senators Levin of Michigan and Nelson of Florida) are back from a missile defense selling mission to Russia, Poland, and the Czech Republic--but the Russians will be a tough sale. Here is a 14-second quote that is pretty close to the sum total of how her trip has been reported locally:


SENATOR COLLINS: "I don't know that we've convinced them, but I think we've advanced the dialogue. And my hope is that the Russians will cooperate with our efforts against this growing threat from Iran."

I've been through several careful reads of the quite important speech on nuclear weapons that President Obama delivered in Prague on April 5. (See HERE and HERE for previous posts citing this speech.)

Sadly, President Obama now has decided to own the Bush missile defense Euro-deployment scheme for himself. Apropos of what Senator Collins has been peddling is this statement from the Obama speech:

PRESIDENT OBAMA (April 5): So 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. 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. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe will be removed.

Despite the loftily stated desire for a "world without nuclear weapons" and sustained hatred of the proposal on the part of the Russians, it looks like business as usual straight from the Bush playbook. Obama seems to want to continue taunting the Russians and proceed apace with the Czech/Polish missile interceptors.

What standard the president will use to determine that these systems, deployed far away from any extremely speculative Iranian missile sites, is "cost-effective and proven" is a total mystery. An examination of the technical issues is HERE. But my simple bottom line is that no sane person believes these missile interceptors would be of any use in dealing with Iran--ever--even if Iranian intercontinental missiles emerge from the Pentagon's Rumsfeldian dream state and are pointed at Europe on some date far in the future.

So how'd the Collins/Levin/Nelson sales pitch go?

Terrible. The Russians don't seem to buy the Iran threat story at all. First, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov scoffed that U.S. "measures of 'transparency and trust' offered to us were mostly symbolic and could not contribute to mitigating Russian concerns."

Then yesterday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's gave these remarks in Helsinki:

MEDVEDEV (April 20): I will not hide Russia's position which has been stated repeatedly: we are very concerned about the prospect of the unilateral deployment of antimissile systems, which damages the current system of checks and balances in this field and very much complicates the prospects for nuclear disarmament.

Unfortunately, we could not find a common language on this subject with the previous administration of the United States of America, but in London we agreed with the President of the United States to continue to discuss this issue. Our proposals for broad international cooperation against possible missile threats remain valid ? we have laid them out more than once ? but substantive talks on this issue naturally remain to come.

It is a clear and simple truth that truly global missile defence cannot simply accommodate the interests of one state or group of states, and neither can its parameters be set unilaterally, as we have unfortunately observed in the case of well-known decisions on the deployment of an antimissile defence system in Europe. And as we see it, the debate about antimissile elements in Europe must involve all Europeans, not just a club of favourites that has taken the obligation to hold this debate upon itself. This worries us all. And if we are to set up antimissile defence, then it should be global.

"Damages the current system," "complicates the prospects," and "cannot simply accommodate" would suggest that such deployments could not possibly be followed by Russia deciding to "cooperate with our efforts," as Senator Collins wants. Maybe Collins should have received a lesson in true cooperation from Medvedev.

Furthermore, the Russians have an answer to the ballistic missile defense (BMD) they consider actually to be offensive in character.

BMD Focus: Russia boosts ICBM arsenal
Martin Sieff | Washington DC (UPI) | Apr 14, 2009

Russia's leaders appear interested in a new strategic arms-reduction agreement with the United States. But until one is finally negotiated, they are pushing ahead with an ambitious and expanded program of nuclear-missile development.

Three-star Col. Gen Nikolai Solovtsov, the commander of the Strategic Missile Forces, last week unveiled plans to test at least 14 intercontinental ballistic missiles within the next nine months.

"Fourteen launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles of various types are planned for 2009," Solovtsov told the RIA Novosti news agency. ...

The answer is, okay, you want a new arms race, you've got one.

Of course, the U.S. nuclear terror state and space weapons state is full of its oats after believing it had forced Russia into a humiliating position after the Soviet collapse. They seem to feel like they can push the Russians around, as was evident when President Clinton ushered in NATO expansion and strategic realignment with a space weapons focus.

Bruce Gagnon discusses how Clinton "quietly created the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and moved the $3.5 billion into the new space weapons development organization" in a recent piece for Foreign Policy in Focus. The space weapons state that President Obama has inherited from President Bush now may be consuming $75 billion per year, including the BMDO morphed into the "Missile Defense Agency (MDA) with an annual budget of $10 billion per year."

Meanwhile, the nuclear terror state in parallel busily is concocting schemes like the rapid Global Strike mission to keep it's own strategic rationale current, and the Complex 2030 project to keep the technical and industrial resources for building nuclear weapons always in need of budget.

I'll have to leave all that for another post. But therein lies what I believe is an explanation for the new president's along with our senator's interest in keeping the Bush Euro-missile deployment scheme progressing. It is commanded by agencies with the most advanced aerospace technology developed during six decades of cold war planning, under assumptions of perpetual nuclear terror and having a deeply entrenched budget river.

If the country of Iran did not exist to be used as a cudgel to terrify the public into continually signing the checks for this, it would have to be invented.