International irony

[unixronin]

Remember when the Poles were furious at being thrown to the wolves by President Obama's cancellation of the ballistic missile defense systems to be installed in Poland because Russia was angry at the proposed ABM deployment?  Well, apparently, as a compromise deal, Poland just received a Patriot surface-to-air missile battery.

Ironically, it turns out that this is what the Poles really wanted all along.  The Patriot battery would do comparatively little to protect Eastern Europe from a hypothetical ballistic-missile attack launched from the Middle East (Iran, say), but would present a serious threat to local Russian air power, sufficient to give Poland at least temporary air superiority in its own airspace in the event of a conventional attack.

Find the STRATFOR analysis here, along with further discussion of Germany, Russia, the future of the EU, and the potential for a post-EU Russian-German alignment.

Comments

[montieth.livejournal.com]

Yep, the GeoPolitical sources I was looking at were saying that the Czechs and the Poles were agreeable to the whole installations IF they got patriots to go with it. The Big thing being Permanently stationed US forces as a speed-bump to any Russian aggression. Such installations would HAVE to factor into Russian calculations and we're a MUCH bigger nut to crack and much harder to figure out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av8F21L5AYs&feature=related).

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

Well, our CIC is a much bigger nut, but I think he's already cracked.

[montieth.livejournal.com]

But there's still a pretty good cadre of General Officers who'll push him towards more belligerent responses if the situation warrants. Given the Rumint I heard about President Obama's demeanor after his first (very protracted) national security briefing, I expect he probably realized that a lot of things are less orderly and easy than he originally thought.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, really? Inquiring minds are ... inquiring. :)

[montieth.livejournal.com]

Given I'm friends with someone who works for an undersecretary of Defense, I'm kinda connected. The Ruminit is that he looked like he had been poleaxed (pale and rather worried) for the first few days. It was pretty much non-stop national security "you need to know about this, and this, and this and this" kind of stuff. Given what we hear in the news and in open source, I'm sure there's some pretty scary shit out there in the closed source Intelligence community that he just wasn't prepared for when he was running for office.

I expect, that unless he's doing the "Just for men thing" to conceal the gray OR I guess just ignoring it all, he's going to look pretty gray after his 4 years are up.

We'll see when we get the first real shooting incident with Iran. I'm sure someone's going to push and see how far they can go. We'll see what sort of sand he has then I guess.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

yeah, he changed his stance on a bunch of things right after that....

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

In related news, it's rumored the House just killed closing Guantanamo (http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/05/24/house-kills-plan-to-close-guantanamo/).

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

How odd. By breaking one promise, Obama fulfilled another.