Byron York, Washington Examiner:
Now Obama is president and faces two problems for which missile defense is a possible solution. The first is North Korea’s launch of a ballistic missile which might someday carry a nuclear warhead. The second is Iran’s continuing effort to build a nuclear weapon. With that in the news, Obama pledged in the Czech Republic that, “as long as the threat from Iran persists,” the U.S. “will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven.”
In light of Obama’s history on the subject, what was he saying? Why would he go out of his way to tell an audience in the Czech Republic that a missile defense system must be cost effective? And since he said that he will go forward, but only with a system that is “cost-effective and proven,” was he saying that such a system exists today?
I posed the question to the White House, and a spokesman was as artful with words as his boss. “There is a provision in the defense authorization law for the last two years that establishes a process whereby such technology will be ‘proven’ technologically capable,” he said. What the White House left unsaid is that the missile defense system to be installed in Europe has not been established to be “proven.”
So what does the president’s statement mean? I asked Lawrence Korb, the former Reagan Defense Department official who is now a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress. Korb, who ran the Obama campaign’s military-policy team, recently wrote a report recommending the European missile-defense system be “halted until it has proven itself in realistic operational tests.” Korb told me he believed Obama said “basically the same thing” in Prague that Korb and his colleagues wrote in their report. “When it’s cost effective and proven, we’ll do it,” Korb said. “But it’s not ready yet.”
That’s not how the untrained ear would interpret Obama’s latest remarks. So here is the lesson. When the president says he will “go forward with a missile defense,” don’t assume that he will go forward with a missile defense. Don’t listen to what he said in Prague. Listen to what he said in Iowa.
Nuance.
$1.4 billion cut from missile defense; $8 billion allotted to ACORN.
Give him this much: Obama is willing to fund something he knows for sure will work.
YES HE CAN!
****
related: WSJ, courtesy of Tman:
Rarely has a Presidential speech been so immediately and transparently divorced from reality as Mr. Obama’s in Prague. The President delivered a stirring call to banish nuclear weapons at the very moment that North Korea and Iran are bidding to trigger the greatest proliferation breakout in the nuclear age. Mr. Obama also proposed an elaborate new arms-control regime to reduce nuclear weapons, even as both Pyongyang and Tehran are proving that the world’s great powers lack the will to enforce current arms-control treaties.
There’s no doubting the emotive appeal of Mr. Obama’s grand no-nukes vision. Ronald Reagan shared a similar hope, and in recent years these pages have run a pair of news-making essays by George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn positing such a diplomatic goal. They probably gave Mr. Obama the idea. But the Gipper understood the practical limits of arms control in delivering such a world, and Messrs. Shultz and Kissinger are hard-headed enough to know that global rogues must be contained if we are going to have any hope of a nuclear-free future.
Mr. Obama recognized this rogue proliferation threat in his Prague address, but to counter it he offered only more treaties of the kind that are already ignored. OK, not merely more treaties. Two days earlier in Strasbourg he also vouchsafed the power of his own moral example.
“And I had an excellent meeting with President Medvedev of Russia to get started that process of reducing our nuclear stockpiles, which will then give us a greater moral authority to say to Iran, don’t develop a nuclear weapon; to say to North Korea, don’t proliferate nuclear weapons,” Mr. Obama said, implying that previous American Presidents had lacked such “authority.”
The President went even further in Prague, noting that “as a nuclear power — as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon — the United States has a moral responsibility to act.” That barely concealed apology for Hiroshima is an insult to the memory of Harry Truman, who saved a million lives by ending World War II without a bloody invasion of Japan. As for the persuasive power of “moral authority,” we should have learned long ago that the concept has no meaning in Pyongyang or Tehran, much less in the rocky hideouts of al Qaeda.
The truth is that Mr. Obama’s nuclear vision has reality exactly backward. To the extent that the U.S. has maintained a large and credible nuclear arsenal, it has prevented war, defeated the Soviet Union, shored up our alliances and created an umbrella that persuaded other nations that they don’t need a bomb to defend themselves.
Sure, when you put it that way.
But lest we forget: baby ducks and fuzzy bunnies!
“Cost effective” and “proven” will turnout to have their meaning defined by what will prevent a missile defense system from being in the hands of the USA.
Compared to the “cost” of even one nuke hitting a major city the TARP and Stimulus bill combined look small. “Proven” is like saying don’t release any computer program until you can “prove” that no bugs are in it. Guaranteed to kill it.
We loves us some word games. ‘Cause we can’t tell the truth.
Playground sentiments apllied to international politics, especially when dealing with a “stone age communist” regime, somehow perk me up. Things will turn around when Obamapolitik produces its fruits. It’s just a shame so many will die to prove him wrong.
[…] more Obama insists that he’s not naive, the clearer it becomes that he is dreadfully naive–with a complementary political cynicism […]
baby ducks and fuzzy bunnies
I prefer turtles.
So, this now, in addition to watching my air support slowly vanish into the budgetary wood-chipper. Well, and the Navy too. Thank God I’ll be retired in 3-4 years.
SarahW, that title, “Turtle eating pigeon” had me going there for a second. Wowwee, I thought, that’s gotta be one persistent [Obama’s sort of persistent] bird.
Can anyone else remember the last time a president trashed the US so much during a visit overseas? I really can’t believe the nerve of this fucking guy.
“the United States has a moral responsibility to act”
Unlike say, the moral responsibility to hold Saddam accountable in 2003?
What a douchenozzle. I am really beginning to hate this guy.
What ever happened to those people bitching about body armor. Isn’t a missile shield like body armor for our country? Now that they want to cut the defense budget to all hell you would think they would be speaking up. I guess this situation has more nuance or some such bullshit.
Which air support was that, John? Pretty much all the air support platforms in the air right now will stay in the air for quite a few years.
“Cost effective” is nonsense for a military missile defense system. The only way you get your “money’s worth” is if somebody lobs a missile at you. Otherwise, it’s pure drain.
He’s maneuvering for a triangulation.
“What a douchenozzle. I am really beginning to hate this guy.”
At least I don’t feel alone anymore.
The issue is not what this means to us. The issue is what this means to Moscow.
[…] H/T Protein Wisdom […]
Carol Negro is on to something here: “Obama’s real message to Europe”
Link, sorry.
Slart,
Isn’t the F-22 going to get cut off/numbers chopped? I rather like the idea that if we rumble with Russia or China, that I won’t have to try and remember all those old Cold War era “now, lets see…line up the nose of the MiG and then add two football fields…” things.
The F22 program is to be truncated at 184 planes. What that means, of course, is that they’ll be back to trim it again, because cutting the numbers makes the per-plane cost go up and that’s an attractive “saving”. I expect, in the end, a hundred or so.
The F-35, all variants, is currently expected to be fully funded for 1400 aircraft. That’s roughly 200 VSTOL Harrier-replacements for the Marines, something like 300 Naval variants, and the rest to be hung about with ordnance as ground-attack platforms. Take away the pylons and F-35 is a medium-good air-to-air fighter, roughly equivalent to a block II F-16. (Saying “F-35” is about like saying “B-body GM”. Some of the variants are wild enough that if you saw them parked beside others you’d say it was different aircraft.)
I expect the Texas Congressional delegation to raise a stink about trimming F-22 back. It’s the old dilemma of sunk costs vs. marginal costs, and Lockeheed-Martin has learned a lot about manufacturing composite airplanes. A cynic told me that currently the cost of complying with the procurement system is nearly equal to their cost for building an airframe and engines, not counting electronics, etc.
Regards,
Ric
F-35 is more of a CAS platform, where F-22 is more air superiority/CAP.
As I see it, anyway. A-10 didn’t used to have a CAS mission, nor did B-1. Things change. They’re using the hell out of B-1s in Afghanistan, or so I hear from B-1 drivers.
What the hell is a Block II F-16?
I wouldn’t say “wild”. “Different planform”, more like.
Texas isn’t the only place jobs will be lost. The things are actually assembled in Georgia, so I expect they’ll raise a stink as well.
#13
I don’t think Moscow is much to worry about right now. China has been outspending everyone on its military and stealing anything not nailed down. God help us if they get a 2 ocean navy.
Slightly different planforms. Really, they all look very much the same, unless you paint them differently.
That is a dahmer turtle I think. Very rare. I wish I could unsee that.
Maybe this’ll help.
They’re majestic creatures.
Agreed, although I’m not so crazy about turtle impersonators.
My guess is, that like Iraq and Afghanistan, he will continue what was going forward.
“It isn’t proven!”
“Yes it is. Now let me eat my waffle.”
[…] more Obama insists that he’s not naive, the clearer it becomes that he is dreadfully naive–with a complementary political cynicism […]
[…] heard a similar argument from this Administration as a justification for cutting missile defense — namely, that until […]