Obama’s ‘Curious Justification’ For Unilateral Disarmament
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Many Americans are slack-jawed over President Obama’s decision to cancel the deployment of land-based missile defense systems in Eastern Europe and justifying it by saying the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) believes Iran’s long-range missile capability has been “slower to develop” than predicted and, therefore, the threat is “not as immediate as previously thought.”
Given that there’s publicly-available evidence that Iran’s long-range missile capabilities are improving (they’ve already put satellites in space), this is especially stupefying. And Americans have damned good reason for being dismayed - Obama’s reasons just don’t pass the smell test, especially in light of the fact that making such a decision was his agenda all along, the fact that this episode is eerily reminiscent of the IC’s 2007 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program (which was both fatally flawed and policy-motivated - the IC subsequently reversed its conclusions from just two years prior), and if Iran can put satelites in space they can damned well develop long range missiles from the same technology - and do so much sooner rather than later just like the Russians did after Sputnik. After all, it is indeed no secret that the development of space satellites is closely related to ballistic missile development.
As Thomas Joscelyn writes at The Blog:
[...] there is nothing surprising about this development and it is certainly not about Iran’s missile programs alone. Although President Obama and Secretary Gates claim that a new intelligence assessment of Iran’s missile program led to the decision, it is in reality the fulfillment of a long-time policy goal. The Democrats have been pushing to capitulate to the Russians on this for years.
Moreover, you could see this coming in Secretary Gates’s discussion of the defense budget in April. Gates announced that the budget for missile defense was to be decreased by $1.4 billion, additional ground-based interceptors in Alaska were to be canceled, and funds were being directed to the same short and medium-range defense systems (SM-3, Aegis) that Obama and Gates are now emphasizing.
The appointment of Ellen Tauscher as the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security in June was another good indication of what was to come. For years, Tauscher objected to the Bush administration’s pursuit of a land-based missile defense system in Eastern Europe capable of countering the threat of long-range missiles. Tauscher has repeatedly drawn a distinction between Iran’s existing short and medium-range missile capabilities, and its continued pursuit of a more long-range missile capability. In an interview with Der Spiegel in 2007, Tauscher explained the thinking behind a missile defense bill she had introduced:
“In the bill, what we have done is we have effectively said that we don’t want construction to begin. We don’t want site preparation to begin. We want engagement on a diplomatic level. So we will slow them down. The current threat is short- and mid-range, I am for protecting against that now. The long-range threat, analysts say, will come out of Iran in 2015.”The Obama administration’s talking points now mirror Tauscher’s from yesteryear with one noteworthy exception — they now say that Iran probably won’t have a long-range missile capability by 2015. Thus, Obama and Gates argue, there is no need to deploy the missile defense system today if Iran is progressing more slowly than previously expected. But this leads us to the next point.
Second, in all likelihood, the IC doesn’t have a firm grasp Iran’s long-range missile development and basing key decisions on the IC’s analyses of Iran’s missile programs alone is a fool’s errand.
The 2015 benchmark Tauscher mentioned has been widely cited, but it was always a rough benchmark. Looking back through the IC’s analyses of Iran’s ballistic missile capability it is clear that our spooks have never really predicted with any great deal of confidence what was to come. In 1995, for example, our analysts explained: “We have no evidence Iran wants to develop an ICBM.” Whoops, that turned out not to be true. So, our analysts rewrote their assessments. But those estimates, including one in 1999 and another in 2001, are filled with so many caveats that it is impossible to believe our super-secret intelligence on Iran’s missile programs is all that good.
It is true that 2015 was the common benchmark deduced from these assessments, but you will be hard-pressed to find a single instance when the IC says that year is the definitive cut-off. And, as a report by the Congressional Research Service noted earlier this year, the IC has always been of multiple minds when it comes to Iran’s development of ICBM’s.
Therefore, it is hard to believe that the Obama administration’s new analysis, which apparently pushes the 2015 benchmark back further, is much better than what we had previously. It is also hard to believe that the disagreements within the IC on this issue have been resolved.
But, isn’t it fortunate that the new analysis fits the Obama administration’s preconceived narrative (e.g. Tauscher’s view) about Iran’s long-range missile capabilities?
Continue reading: A Curious Justification. There’s much more.
Meanwhile, as expected, the Russians can barely contain their glee. For them, Christmas came early and it cost them bupkus.
