Foreign Affairs

“This Polish missile defense system walks into a bar at noon and says, “Give me six shots of Vodka.”
“How can you afford to get drunk in the middle of a business day?” the bartender asks.
“Easy,” the Polish missile defense system replies. “I don’t work.””

-That joke comes from Jeff Huber, on his blog Pen and Sword. http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/ When I read last week that President Obama had ordered a change in the Bush/Cheney missile defense plan for Eastern Europe, I knew that the right wing would be all over this as a sign that Obama was opening the gates for his Soviet overlords. Missile defense is part of Republican orthodoxy, another example of their preference for faith over science, especially when that faith comes with billions in defense contracts. The GOP has been enthralled by “star wars” ever since Edward Teller, the original “Dr. Strangelove,” sold the idea to Ronald Reagan many billions of dollars ago.

Huber is a retired Navy Commander who used to do air traffic control for carrier-based warplanes. He is an authority on the human cost of listening to saber-rattling chicken hawks. He’s not one to roll over for the Commander-In- Chief either, just check his posts on the quagmire he calls “Bananastan.”

But Huber agrees with Obama’s decision to scrap the planned radar and missile installations in Poland. So does Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This must be a relief to millions of Europeans, who would rather not be at ground zero of some neo-con gambit. The Russians, for their part, have decided not to stage new SS-26 Iskander missiles on the Polish border.

I see this as a welcome break from the old cold war cycle of fear and escalation that has brought the world to the brink of destruction so many times before.
So I won’t be getting excited when McCain, Kyl, Boehner, and the brass-hats-for-hire on Faux News try to tell me that the sky is falling.