Opportunity Costs
Robert Farley notes a wrinkle of the NIE-fallout that should be getting more attention:
For the last two years, we have justified putting a missile defense system in Eastern Europe explicitly around the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. In addition to the extraordinary financial costs, this project has resulted in increased Russian hostility to the United States and to Russia’s neighbors. And are we now to believe that this expensive and unpopular system is justified by the need to protect Poland from Iranian ballistic missiles armed with conventional warheads?
If the Bush administration really knew about the content of the report since 2006, this means for the last year, we’ve been pissing off Russia by trying put missile defense bases in their “near abroad” to defend against a non existent threat. This displays a combination of recklessness, maliciousness, and incompetence that has even managed to surprise me. For all we know, the administration was pursuing an expensive, unpopular policy that makes cooperation with Russia over other issues more difficult just for the hell of it.
[...] their nuclear physicists who already know how to make a nuclear weapon, as long as we continue to needlessly antagonize countries that significant business interests in Iran it might not matter anyway because they might give Iran the means to produce a weapon and render [...]
Oh, and by the way | Veritosity
December 4, 2007 at 11:17 am