Hard Sell

The general in charge of hawking the missile defence boondoggle seems to have been drinking too much miracle tonic recently. At a conference in London today he presented a sales pitch on a par with Condi's New York mushroom cloud or Tony's forty-five minutes from doom. Lieutenant General Henry Oberling "described a hypothesis in which in 2015 Iran announces it has long-range missiles with a nuclear capability and Europe does not have a missile defence system. Iran blocks the Straits of Hormuz and provokes terrorist attacks in Europe", presumably just for the hell of it. As a result, "there are riots in Europe and only Athens and Rome are protected from Iranian missile attack". This would lead to "fractures in the alliance" as the US roundly scolds its allies for failing to adopt the modern miracle of missile defence when they had the chance.

However, with the modern miracle of missile defence, "we can defeat the missiles and dissuade Iran", a country the Bush administration claims has not been dissuaded from attempting to manufacture nuclear weapons even in the face of the biggest arsenal in the world; and European leaders would be able to "bide time", which is what European leaders like to do. "The decisions we make today, right now, will shape the future," Oberling said, handily adapting the tagline from the film Gladiator. He also proposed another possibility for the year 2015 in which "al-Qaida would capture ships and nuclear-armed missiles"; obviously, with the modern miracle of missile defence, this too would be nothing to worry about. Few things would deter a nuclear-armed al-Qaida more effectively than some missiles which were pointed at Russia in order to deter Iran, and which the Bush administration said would work.