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A strong pitch for the shield

Bush visit highlights broad campaign to build support for missile-defense system

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
June 6th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
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KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
President Václav Klaus has voiced thanks for Bush's diplomatic efforts on missile defense base plans.
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U.S. President George W. Bush took the podium at Prague Castle Tuesday morning to make a personal pitch for locating the radar component of a U.S.-sponsored European missile-defense system in the Czech Republic. But the real work of building support for the facility had begun days earlier, at a high-level conference at the Foreign Affairs Ministry.
At the May 31 gathering, which included missile-shield advocates such as Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek and U.S. Ambassador to NATO Victoria Nuland, a succession of speakers made their case for Czech involvement in a shield system that the United States says would guard Europe against missiles launched from Iran and other so-called rogue states. Held for journalists and opinion-makers, the conference was also broadcast live on Czech Television's ČT24.
The theme of precarious, unreliable European security permeated the speeches.
“It’s an illusion that it’s a golden age and nothing can hurt us,” Topolánek said. Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra said that, unlike the superpowers of the Cold War, which operated on the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction, today’s terrorists are reckless. “We can’t rely on them not being foolish,” he said.
James Townsend Jr, director of the Program on International Security of the Atlantic Council of the United States, echoed this refrain: “Some believe that if a nation minds its own business it will be left alone. This is naive and a sure road to tragedy,” he said, recalling both the German and Soviet occupations of Czechoslovakia.
Townsend recounted his own transition from shield skeptic to believer after learning in July 2006, when he worked at the Pentagon, that the North Koreans were making advancements in their efforts to build long-range missiles. “I was stunned that such an immediate threat to the U.S. appeared,” he said. He likened the experience to that of the Danes when they saw their flag being burned last year in the midst of a controversy over cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.
“No matter how good we assume the international community perceives us … we can quickly and unexpectedly become targets,” Townsend said.
Denmark’s deputy secretary of state for defense, Kristian Fischer, also attended the conference. Denmark hosts a U.S. early-warning radar base, a component of the U.S. shield, in Greenland.
Władysław Stasiak, Polish state secretary and head of the National Security Office, also sounded alarm bells. “Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and means of delivery is not a myth, not a fiction,” he said, asserting that more than 20 countries have or will soon have the ability to strike Europe, and that each year the number of ballistic missile tests increases 10 percent.
Nuland talked about a comprehensive system in which the U.S. component could be “bolted together” with a complementary NATO missile shield. NATO is building a short- and midrange system that could work in tandem with the long-range U.S. system, she said.
“The general trend among all NATO nations is toward the acceptance of the need for missile defense,” said Tim Williams, head of the European Security Programme of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in the United Kingdom. But NATO involvement in the long-range system would hamper decision-making in the event of an attack, he argued.
Antonín Šeďa, deputy chairman of Czech Parliament’s defense committee, said he wants to see the United States guarantee that “the U.S. system [will] become an integrated part of the defense of NATO.”
Stasiak said he sees European security and Atlantic security as indivisible, and that as fully engaged members of NATO, both the Czech Republic and Poland should consider hosting the shield. Furthermore, Vondra argued, if the United States had a shield and Europe didn’t, Europe would be even more likely to be attacked.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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