Poles, Czechs: US missile defense shift a betrayal

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090918/ap_on_re_eu/eu_eastern_europe_missile_defense_22

WARSAW, Poland – Poles and Czechs voiced deep concern Friday at
President Barack Obama's decision to scrap a Bush-era missile defense
shield planned for their countries.

"Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back," the
Polish tabloid Fakt declared on its front page.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski said he was concerned that Obama's new
strategy leaves Poland in a dangerous "gray zone" between Western
Europe and the old Soviet sphere.

Recent events in the region have rattled nerves throughout central and
eastern Europe, a region controlled by Moscow during the Cold War,
including the war last summer between Russia and Georgia and ongoing
efforts by Russia to regain influence in Ukraine. A Russian cutoff of
gas to Ukraine last winter left many Europeans without heat.

The Bush administration's plan would have been "a major step in
preventing various disturbing trends in our region of the world,"
Kaczynski said in a guest editorial in the daily Fakt and also carried
on his presidential Web site.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said he still sees a chance for
Poles and Czechs to participate in the redesigned missile defense
system. But that did not appear to calm nerves in Warsaw or Prague.

Kaczynski expressed hopes that the U.S. will now offer Poland other
forms of "strategic partnership."

In Prague, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kohout said he made two concrete
proposal to U.S. officials on Thursday in hopes of keeping the
U.S.-Czech alliance strong: for the U.S. to establish a branch of West
Point for NATO members in Central Europe and to "send a Czech
scientist on the U.S. space shuttle to the international space
station."

An editorial in Hospodarske Novine, a respected pro-business Czech
newspaper, said: "an ally we rely on has betrayed us, and exchanged us
for its own, better relations with Russia, of which we are rightly
afraid."

The move has raised fears in the two nations they are being
marginalized by Washington even as a resurgent Russia leaves them
longing for added American protection.

The Bush administration always said that the planned system — with a
radar near Prague and interceptors in northern Poland — was meant as
defense against Iran. But Poles and Czechs saw it as protection
against Russia, and Moscow too considered a military installation in
its backyard to be a threat.

"No Radar. Russia won," the largest Czech daily, Mlada Fronta Dnes,
declared in a front-page headline.

Obama said the old plan was scrapped in part because the U.S. has
concluded that Iran is less focused on developing the kind of
long-range missiles for which the system was originally developed,
making the building of an expensive new shield unnecessary.

The replacement system is to link smaller radar systems with a network
of sensors and missiles that could be deployed at sea or on land. Some
of the weaponry and sensors are ready now, and the rest would be
developed over the next 10 years.

The Pentagon contemplates a system of perhaps 40 missiles by 2015, at
two or three sites across Europe.