Gates & Russia Both Need Better Intel On Iranian Missile Threat

This is an excellent update on missile defense regarding Iranian capabilities and also Russian concern about deployment of the missile defense system in Poland.
Rees

from Closing Velocity
by John McKittrick
June 10, 2009

A couple of months ago, the Russian ambassador to the United States asserted:

Iran poses no threat to the United States, Russia said Tuesday, rebuffing a key argument of President Barack Obama on whether to go ahead with a European missile shield bitterly opposed by Moscow.

"I don't see any threat to the United States coming from Iran anytime soon," Kislyak told a conference of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Weeks after this confident proclamation, Iran test fired a new ballistic missile that can reach the majority of European capital cities. Including Moscow, Comrade Ambassador.

Rightly on the congressional hot seat for his Obama-directed gutting of the missile defense budget, Secretary of Defense Gates says the Russians are full of it:

Gates recounted a meeting he had with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during which the then-president "basically dismissed the idea that the Iranians would have a missile that would have the range to reach much of western Europe and much of Russia before 2020 or so."

"And he showed me a map that his intelligence guys had prepared," Gates told a Senate Appropriations panel. "I told him he needed a new intelligence service."

As I've stated many times, there is only one reason the Russians fear US missile defense bases in Eastern Europe .... and it has nothing to do with "missile defense" and everything to do with "US bases in Eastern Europe":



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