Attacking Our Patriots

Attacking Our Patriots


By INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, August 28, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Democrats: Joe Biden shares Barack Obama's lifelong commitment to keeping America unprotected against nuclear missile attack. Neither he nor Obama wants to protect Georgia — theirs or ours.

What sealed the deal for Poland in allowing the deployment of U.S. ground-based interceptors (GBI) on its soil was the deployment of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missiles on its soil.

PAC-3 missiles are true anti-missile missiles, much more sophisticated than their predecessors that were pressed into action during Desert Storm.

Warsaw knows that PAC-3 missiles might have proven useful in Russia's invasion of Georgia and would be useful in its defense as well. Russia has threatened to station short-range SS-21 missiles and its longer range SS-26 cousin in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave the size of Connecticut on Poland's northeastern border and in neighboring Belarus.

According to the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, Russia fired more than two dozen SS-21s, with a range from 43 to 75 miles depending on the variant, into the defenseless democracy of Georgia.

The Georgian government said two SS-26 missiles, with roughly twice the range, had targeted an oil pipeline crossing its territory.

"The outward military aggression with the use of ballistic missiles from Russia on a former USSR country sends a very serious message to all former members of the Soviet bloc," says Riki Ellison, MDAA founder and president.

The interceptors will be deployed at Redzikovo Polish military base close to the Baltic Sea in northern Poland. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stationed in Europe is expected to begin construction of the GBI site in the next 12 to 18 months with the first missiles on alert by 2012.

This assumes an Obama-Biden administration will not cut off funding or bargain it away in a deal with Moscow.

Joe Biden considers forward deployment of such missile defenses in general, and national missile defense in general, to be unnecessarily provocative. During a debate in June 2000, he said building missile defenses would be "acting on our worst fears" and would "only make those fears come true."

Biden attacked President Bush's "theological" belief in missile defense in a September 2001 speech at the National Press Club. "Are we willing to end four decades of arms control agreements, and go it alone, a kind of bully nation, sometimes a little wrongheaded, but ready to make unilateral decisions in what we perceive to be our self-interest?' " he asked.

In a December 18, 2001, op-ed in the Washington Post titled "Missile Defense Delusion," Biden wrote: "President Bush's decision to unilaterally walk away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is a serious mistake."

The ABM Treaty forbids building a defensive shield, except for the one the Soviets built around Moscow. It was in fact a necessary first step in fulfilling President Reagan's dream of a national missile defense protecting the American people. It was definitely in our national interest.

Biden voted against funding for Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative in September 1987 in the midst of Biden's presidential run.

In a Post article in May 1987, he is quoted as saying: "This immaculately conceived notion has obviously demonstrated a certain mystical appeal. Unfortunately, it has no possibility of practical implementation."

He went on to say SDI "pushed Soviet behavior the wrong way" and that "the president's continued adherence to it constitutes one of the most reckless acts in the history of modern statecraft."

And yet, it was Reagan's adherence to SDI doomed the Soviet Union and helped win the Cold War.

Two decades later, no thanks to Joe Biden, we have an active global defense with ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California, Aegis warships cruising the world's oceans and Patriot missiles deployed worldwide.

In his acceptance speech Wednesday night, Biden promised that he and Obama "will hold Russia accountable for its actions." But Propaganda Joe obviously has no conflict with Obama who, in a video pledge to the liberal group Caucus4Priorities, pledged: "I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems."

Fact is, Obama-Biden wouldn't defend Georgia or Poland or the Czech Republic or NATO or the U.S. from missile attack by a hostile power. The only thing that would stand between the West and a mushroom cloud would be their aggressive personal diplomacy.



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