Word: shields
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Given the link drawn by Obama, soon after he took office, between Russian cooperation on Iran and the missile-defense plan, it's hard not to read the shelving of the missile shield as at least partly a move to enlist Russian support on Iran. It's not at all certain, however, that such support will be forthcoming. Moscow does not believe Iran is currently pursuing nuclear weapons, and its adversarial relationship with Washington will be maintained as long as the likes of Ukraine and Georgia are being considered for NATO membership. Critics in Washington are already accusing Obama...
...controlled territories. Already, the limits of what former Soviet-satellite states can expect from the West was cruelly demonstrated last year, when the U.S. was unable to do anything to prevent Russian tanks from rolling into Georgia to punish that country's military for attacking South Ossetia. The missile-shield decision will confirm fears that Washington's power to roll back Russian influence in the region is waning...
...Still, giving up the protection offered by the missile shield is not particularly difficult for the U.S. - for the simple reason that the shield doesn't offer any significant protection. The system that would have been deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic was in every sense a work in progress whose testing had not yet proved any real-world capacity to deal with a hostile missile threat. In that sense, the missile "shield" was every bit as hypothetical as the Iranian missile threat against which it was ostensibly deployed...
Read "Poles, Czechs Balk at Missile Shield...
...when news was confirmed that the U.S. had scrapped plans to place part of a missile-defense shield in a military zone near the town, Jan Neoral, the mayor of Trokavec and a vocal anti-missile-shield campaigner, announced with uncharacteristic understatement that President Barack Obama's decision was "a satisfaction." (Read "Obama Shelves U.S. Missile Shield: The Winners and Losers...