Bush fails on missile defense

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Bush fails on missile defense
20:24 | 09/ 06/ 2008



MOSCOW. (Nikita Petrov exclusively for RIA Novosti) - President Bush's missile defenses are dying with his presidency, but they might not rest in peace.

The Czech government is on the verge of a crisis. Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said that his Cabinet might collapse in the fall. He admitted that the Cabinet lost a firm majority in parliament over the possible deployment of a high-frequency radar of the U.S. third positioning strategic missile defense area in the Czech Republic. Environmentalist deputies did not even want to hear about it, while others insist on a nation-wide referendum, which the government cannot win because 68% of the population is emphatically against the deployment.

The situation in the Czech Republic is not the only bad news for the Pentagon. Its relations with Poland are even worse. Warsaw demands that Washington pay $20 billion for the missile interceptor base at Gorsko. Poland wants to spend the money on reforming its armed forces and protecting itself against a potential Russian threat. It is planning, among other things, to buy American Patriot PAC-3 air defense systems.

Moscow generals have already promised Warsaw to retarget their missiles to American positions, and to deploy tactical Iskander-M missiles in the Kaliningrad Region, from where they can reach U.S. ground based interceptors in Poland. But this is merely a side effect. What matters more is that the Pentagon does not agree with the price. It is offering a thousand times less in the hope that the Polish government will pay the rest from its own budget. The talks continue, but their prospects are rather bleak.

In the meantime, the U.S. House of Representatives has cut spending on the American missile defense program in Europe in the 2008-2009 fiscal year by $720 million. Expenses on the construction of bases in the Czech Republic and Poland have been reduced by $232 million. Congress declared that this restriction would be valid until Washington signed agreements with Prague and Warsaw on the deployment of the radar and missile interceptors on their territory.

This means that the current Republican administration will not be able to start the deployment of the U.S. missile defense system in Europe. Leading U.S. experts on missile defense - Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, and Philip Coyle, senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information - expressed this opinion at the Carnegie Center during their recent visit to Moscow.

The Carnegie Center hosted a round table discussion on the future of missile defenses in U.S. strategy and policy, and the American experts, both Democrats, agreed that if their nominee Barrack Obama wins the presidential elections, which is quite likely, the deployment of the missile defense system in Europe, which worries Russia so much, may be put on the backburner. This may happen not only because the Pentagon cannot reach a final agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic, but also because the threat emanating for the United States from ballistic missiles from "rogue states," among which Washington lists Iran, is not as severe as the administration portrays it.

House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt even said that this threat has been decreasing during the last 20 years. He said that today, the world has fewer missiles than 20 years ago; fewer states are carrying out missile programs, and there are fewer enemy missiles targeted at the United States. He emphasized that fewer countries are developing long-range ballistic missiles than 20 years ago, and they are technically inferior. This fully applies to Iran.

Some observers attribute the delay in deploying the U.S. missile defense system in Europe to Russia's successful foreign policy. The Kremlin was adamant and did not believe the words about the system's "Iranian orientation." It strongly objected to its deployment, and strengthened its position with the promise of adequate asymmetrical measures against the Pentagon's action. At the same time, Moscow proposed a joint system of global missile defense to Washington, which would counter missile threats, primarily those posed by medium- and shorter-range missiles possessed by more than 20 countries, including Russia's next-door neighbors. But this initiative has not received any response.

A statement to this effect was made by Lt. Gen. Yevgeny Buzhinsky, deputy head of the Russian Defense Ministry's Main Department of International Military Cooperation, who is a permanent participant in the talks on the missile defense system with the United States. Moreover, he criticized those American politicians who believe that Russia has reconciled itself to the deployment of the U.S. missile defense system in Europe. "These assertions are baseless," he said.

He told journalists that since the Moscow meeting of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and their Russian counterparts Sergei Lavrov and Anatoly Serdyukov in the 2+2 format last March, the two sides have conducted three rounds of bilateral consultations on this issue, but without any positive results.

The Russian general said that the U.S. proposals, which were called upon to alleviate Russian apprehensions regarding the U.S. missile system, are now being supplemented with all kinds of terms. The latter are reducing to naught even the minor concessions that were made to Russia in Moscow. "We welcomed the U.S. proposals because they testified to the U.S. understanding of our concerns, but nothing has changed since then," Buzhinsky said.

Moscow understands that even a new Democratic administration is unlikely to give up the obsessive and egoistic idea of protecting the United States against all sorts of missiles, especially since the United States has the financial and economic resources to do so. Technologically, this may be an unfeasible task, but that is a question for the future.

As for today, it is becoming obvious that the United States will not start the deployment of its missile defense system under President Bush. Indicatively, this issue is not on the agenda of his farewell trip to Europe.