Earlier today, American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Polish counterpart finalized a deal [1] for stationing a Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system in Poland. The so-called "American Missile Defense Shield in Europe" has been touted as a defensive move to protect Europe from a hypothetical future attack from "rogue states" like Iran.
The agreement has enraged Russia which views the installation of interceptor missiles in such close proximity to its borders illegal as it violates the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) [2] signed between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972 prohibiting either side from constructing such a system for the simple reason that they are perceived as offensive and designed to deny the other side the chance to launch a retaliatory counter strike especially when deployed outside one's territory half way across the world.
Rice speaking to reporters traveling with her in Warsaw said: "When you threaten Poland you perhaps forget that it is not 1988, it's 2008 and the United States has a firm treaty guarantee to defend Poland's territory as if it was the territory of the United States." Earlier on Monday in a similarly ominous remark [3] she said that "we have to deny Russian strategic objectives, which are to undermine Georgia's democracy and using its military capability to damage and destroy Georgian infrastructure."
Of course no one in the media dared to remind Ms. Rice of her own lapse of memory concerning statements she made in 2006 regarding another conflict whereby a powerful nation used its superior military capability to invade, bomb, and destroy another country's infrastructure for well over a month while she stood by and described the resulting death and destruction as "birth pangs of a new Middle East."[4]
The deal signed with Poland today is a continuation of a disastrous American foreign policy which threatens to nullify every international security agreement reached in the last four decades. U.S. unilateral withdrawal from the ABM treaty [5] in June 2002 prompted then Russian President Vladimir Putin to state that "if the US proceeds to void the ABM treaty, [Russia] will withdraw from the whole other systems of treaty relations having to do with the limitation and control of nuclear arms". A warning loosely echoed [6] by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov today.
America’s persistent devotion to these hypocritical double standards is actually hastening the emergence of a new world disorder by forcing other countries to pull out of international treaties that put limits on nuclear arms. Is that any way of making us, Europe, or the world any safer?
[2] http://www.fas.org/nuke/control/abmt/
[3] http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/08/18/ap5334699.html
[4] http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/69331.htm
[5] http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002_07-08/abmjul_aug02
[6] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3585509,00.html
