Thursday, September 17, 2009

Obama shelves missile defense plan on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland

TFN notes with irony that exactly 70 years from the day the Soviet Union invaded Poland, the Obama Administration announced it was abandoning plans to set up a missile defense shield in eastern Europe:

From TFN:
On the 70th anniversary of the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland — which occurred [on September 17], sixteen days after the beginning of Hitler’s attack on Poland — the Obama Administration announced it planned to scrap the missile defense system that was to be set up in the Czech Republic and in Poland.

Ostensibly, this shield was aimed at screening Europe against long-range missiles from rogue states like Iran. In reality, they were a symbolic commitment of the United States to the independence and sovereignty of Poland and other eastern European states — who are distrustful against the increasingly aggressive posturing of neighboring Russia.

Eastern Europeans have been sold out to the Russians by U.S. Democrats before — when FDR deemed it advantageous to cede them to the tender mercies of his ally Josef Stalin, costing millions of lives over the subsequent half-century.

Of course, you will argue that modern Russia isn’t the Soviet Union and Putin isn’t Stalin.

But I find the timing of the release too symbolic to be purely coincidental...

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