Obama Opens a New “Window of Vulnerability”

Baker Spring / April 22, 2010

According to a Reuters report, the Obama Administration is assessing that Iran could have a long-range ballistic missile by 2015. Now they tell us. Last September, when President Obama announced the cancellation of the program for fielding defensive interceptors in Poland for countering long-range missiles from Iran, it justified the decision on the assertion that Iran was focused on short- and medium-range, not long-range, missiles. Doubtless, the Obama Administration will trash the intelligence community either for being wrong in September or being wrong now. The great thing about being a policy maker is that you are permitted to criticize the intelligence community on whatever grounds you choose.

The bad thing about being a policy maker, however, is that these intelligence assessments can make hash of your policy. So it is with President Obama’s policy to scale back long-range defensive interceptors based in the U.S. from 44 to 30, cancel the interceptors slated for Poland and to phase in its alternative system, called the Phased Adaptive Approach, so that its capability to counter long-range missiles from Iran will not become available until 2020. (more…)