No more surprises

Thursday, September 17th 2009 was a busy news day. 

Capitol Hill in Washington continued to be engrossed in the healthcare debate and the uproar over ACORN. But those weren’t the most significant news stories of the day, even if they did garner most of the attention of the media. There were two other news stories which are likely to have much more far-reaching implications for America and the Free World.

First, the Obama administration announced that it was canceling plans to build missile defense installations and deploy interceptor missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Obama team came prepared with a nice spin on the explanation for this terribly myopic decision. Defense secretary Gates trotted out the Obama party line that they were not in fact abandoning missile defense at all, but were merely switching to a much "better’ plan to deploy sea-based missile defense instead.

Gates said that this decision came as a result of intelligence that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ballistic missile program had not developed as fast as previously thought and that this meant that the chief threat from Iran was not its planned Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) but rather its short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. (We’ll get into the flaws in Gates’ assertion a little later.)

No doubt feeling mighty proud of themselves, Team Obama went back to the much more important task of trying to sell Obamacare to the American people. Unfortunately for the Obamanistas, they hadn’t bothered to coordinate their spin on missile defense with the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Just a few hours after Team Obama had declared victory over the Poles and Czechs on missile defense, the Associated Press released a breaking story about a secret IAEA statement that seemed to contradict most of what that agency has been putting out about Iran for the past several years.

The AP reported that the nuclear experts at the IAEA were in agreement that Iran already possesses the capability to build a nuclear bomb and is "on its way" to developing a missile system capable of delivering a nuclear warhead. Specifically, the report declared that Iran was likely to "overcome problems" on developing a delivery system.

There have been times in the past when US intelligence estimates were proved wrong, but Secretary Gates had barely climbed down from the podium when his homily about the Iranian threat proved to be, well, hogwash. Congratulations Secretary Gates. You’ve set a new record.

Some members of the media professed shock and surprise at the IAEA announcement. They shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Why?

With regard to Iran’s nuclear program, sober and serious Americans have known for some time that Iran has been hell-bent-for-leather to build a nuclear bomb.

Consider this statement in USA Today from January 4, 1994, by Clinton administration Undersecretary of State Lynn Davis: "Iran’s actions leave little doubt that Tehran is intent upon developing a nuclear weapons capability. They are inconsistent with any rational civil nuclear program."

That’s almost 16 years ago. What did the Clinton administration do to attempt to stop Iran’s nuclear program? Nothing.

But before Republicans start pointing fingers, they might want to remind themselves that during 8 years of the Bush administration, no effective action was taken to stop Iran either: not even any meaningfully enforced economic sanctions.

So, for 16 years, we have known and for 16 years we have pulled the blanket over our heads and hoped that the problem would just go away. No one should be surprised that Iran is on the cusp of having a nuclear weapon. We watched carefully for 16 years and let it happen. Of course, as they say, hindsight is 20/20 and we have to deal with today.

And today, Barack Obama has selected policies that will reduce and inhibit our ability to defend ourselves and our allies against the Iranian nuclear and missile threat. Despite the shameless spin that Secretary of Defense Gates tried to put on the announcement to abandon missile defense in Europe, the Obama administration has in fact abandoned a key component in our ability to defend ourselves and it has done so based on what is likely flawed intelligence.

There are 3 basic and tragic flaws in Gates’ story:

1. Our ability to gauge and estimate the capabilities of rogue nations like Iran is notoriously poor. If you just look back at the history of CIA estimates of Iran’s nuclear program, you discover that they have been all over the map, bobbing back and forth like a yo-yo. At one point, for a brief period, the CIA even thought that Iran already had a nuclear bomb. More recently, they claimed that Iran had shut down its nuclear weapons program years ago. That assertion has since been discredited-in fact it was actually contradicted in the footnotes of the very same report in which the assertion was made.

2. Gates says that his plan for missile defense is better than the plan to deploy interceptors in eastern Europe. The basic problem with this argument is that the two plans are not mutually exclusive to begin with-that is, not if you are truly serious about defending America, our allies and our forces overseas against ballistic missile attack. That’s why both systems were developed in the first place. Sea-based missile defense is vital to our overall ability to defend ourselves, but it is not a substitute for the land-based system which is designed to provide defense against longer range ballistic missiles. By abandoning the sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, Obama is leaving a hole in our defense.

To use a football analogy, we will have linemen and linebackers, but we will have no defensive backs under the Obama scheme and if the Iranians decide to throw the Bomb on us, we’ll have nothing back there to cover it.

Obama’s decision is multi-generational. He is sacrificing the safety and security of your children and grandchildren by abandoning a system/plan that has been in the works for several years. When that plan is shut down, it may not be possible for a more responsible and less myopic president to resurrect it. First of all, the Poles were so angry about the decision (On the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland no less; someone buy the Keystone cops in the White House an almanac!) that when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton placed a call to that nation’s leader, he refused to take the call. Second, all of the scientists and engineers who worked on the European land-based missile defense project will now scatter to the winds, some taking early retirement, some getting assigned to other projects and others perhaps going into different industries altogether.

3. On the morning of September 17, we were expected to believe that Iran’s ballistic missile program was not a significant threat. But by the afternoon, the IAEA had rained all over the Krewe of Obama-Gates parade and warned the world that Iran was likely to overcome the challenges of putting a nuclear warhead on top of a ballistic missile delivery vehicle. Again, this should not have come as a surprise because the Obama-Gates story was never believable anyway. We know this because there were two aspects of Iran’s missile program which we knew about which already indicated significant progress:

•  Iran had already mastered solid-fuel technology. This is important because it enables them to launch missiles with little in the way of obvious preparation. In contrast, Iran’s old liquid-fueled rockets had to be erected on their launchers for at least 30 minutes to be fueled just prior to launching. This creates a serious challenge for missile defense because there is no longer any warning time ahead of launch.

• Iran had already put a satellite into orbit. The multi-stage technology involved in this feat is applicable to intercontinental ballistic missiles.

So, even if Iran’s ballistic missile program has not progressed as rapidly as previously predicted, it is still on an upward trajectory (pun intended) and our track record of predicting the outcome of such things has been dirt poor.

At this point, no one should ever be surprised again about the continued progress of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Least surprised of all should be Obama and Gates, because the IAEA just threw egg all over their faces.

Christopher Holton is a Vice President at the Center for Security Policy.