A Lesson in International Gamesmanship By Scott Ritter

[Demeter]

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22206.htm


Barack Obama, Meet Team B



March 13, 2009 "Truthdig" -- President Obama received a lesson in international gamesmanship last week, when his secret offer to trade the deployment of a controversial missile defense system in Eastern Europe for Russian assistance in getting Iran to back down from its nuclear program was publicly rebuffed. The lesson? You don’t get something for nothing, especially when the something you’re looking for is, itself, nothing.

If the members of the Obama administration would bother to take a stroll down memory lane, they might recall that once upon a time there was a document called the anti-ballistic missile treaty, signed in 1972 between the United States and the former Soviet Union, which recognized that anti-missile defense shields were inherently destabilizing, and as such should not be deployed. The ABM treaty represented the foundational agreement for a series of strategic arms limitation and arms reduction agreements that followed. President Obama was 10 years old when that treaty was signed. He was 40 years old when President George W. Bush withdrew from it, in December 2001, and set in motion a series of events that saw arms control between the U.S. and Russia completely unravel. The proposed U.S. missile defense shield, to be deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic, had the Russians talking about scrapping the INF treaty (which eliminated two classes of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that threatened Europe) and deploying highly accurate SS-21 “Iskander” missiles within striking range of the proposed Polish interceptor site.

Russia did not create the missile defense system crisis. The United States did, and, as such, cannot expect to suddenly receive diplomatic credit when it puts this controversial program on the foreign policy gaming table as if it were a legitimate chip to be bargained away.

Russia has always, correctly, claimed that any missile defense system deployed in Eastern Europe can only be directed at Russia. While both the Bush and Obama administrations denied that was the case, Poland has all but admitted its concerns are not about missiles coming from Tehran, but rather missiles coming from Moscow. The American “sweetener” for a potential Polish loss of a missile shield is to offer Poland advanced Patriot surface-to-air missiles, whose intended target is clearly not a Persian missile which cannot reach Polish soil, but rather Russian missiles and aircraft which can.

There are three basic facts that the Obama administration needs to address, but as of yet has not: First, missile defense systems are inherently destabilizing and only contribute to the acquisition of offensive counters designed to defeat those defenses. Second, the rapid expansion of NATO in the past decade has in fact threatened Russia. And third, the Iranian missile “threat” to Europe has always been illusory.....

MUCH MORE AT LINK

[babylonsister]

1. Has this admin been in office for long enough to fully

respond to any foreign policy problem, given all the other challenges? No. I trust they're working on it and will work even harder asap.

[scarletwoman]

2. I'd like to think that they'll get their act together on the foreign policy front but I'm not seeing

much reason for hope. Two words: Dennis Ross. Why does a neocon PNACer have ANY place in this administration?

Add to that the complete lack of pushback as the slavering neocons and Israel-firsters were hounding Chas Freeman out of his appointment.

Even during the campaign, Obama was trotting out nothing but the accepted Foreign Policy Establishment slogans. My expectations are very low.

sw

[babylonsister]

3. sw, we're talking 2 months. I'll wait and see.

As for Freeman, who knows?

http://washingtonindependent.com/33239/so-if-freeman-loses-by-winning

So If Freeman Loses By Winning…

Now that Chas Freeman is out of a job – and this is clearly a win for advocates of Chinese human rights and liberalism and empiricism, and not other issues; Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is obviously playing for votes in Chinatown — it’s worth considering something. The other day I wrote that Freeman’s critics win with him as National Intelligence Council chairman, because it would allow them to marginalize the NIC’s findings if they should ever find them inconvenient. That’s clearly gone.

But perhaps there’s more to it. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, clearly wanted Freeman to stay. He defended Freeman unequivocally to GOP senators in a letter Friday and again today in open testimony. Greg Sargent’s reporting suggests that the Obama administration declined to stand by Freeman in the face of criticism. What’s the likelihood that Blair has much patience with the arguments or the protestations of good faith made by Freeman’s critics in the future? In the long run, as I wrote earlier, Freeman is a minor player and the NIC chairmanship became a backwater in the previous administration. Obviously Blair’s role isn’t a policy role. But this crowd is probably dead to Dennis Blair going forward.

[scarletwoman]

4. Obviously there's no choice but to wait and see, but as I said, I already didn't like

what I was hearing during the campaign, and little has happened since then to make me feel better about Obama on the foreign policy front. I take some consolation from the fact that he's intelligent, but so is Henry Kissinger.

sw

[babylonsister]

5. Jeeze. You're right. He hasn't done a thing. Blast, another failure. nt

[scarletwoman]

6. Don't pull that bogus shit on me. I've said clearly that I didn't like the foreign policy positions

that he was taking during his campaign. It is his stated positions that give me pause, along with other actual facts like his appointment of Dennis Ross, his silence about the attacks on Chas Freeman, and the statements released in reaction to the Brit's decision to start dealing with the political arm of Hizbullah.

Not to mention the fact that 2 days after his inauguration, he gave the go-ahead to missile strikes inside Pakistan.

I certainly HOPE he gets a better foreign policy together, but I'm not going to shut up about what's ALREADY been done.

sw