WASHINGTON, 23 May 2006 — As tension continues to increase over Iran’s nuclear program, the Bush administration wants to establish a new anti-missile system in Europe that would be designed to thwart attacks from the Middle East.
The New York Times reported yesterday that Washington’s proposal, also described in congressional testimony, would install 10 missile interceptors at European sites by 2011. The newspaper says Poland and the Czech Republic are among the nations being considered as possible sites.
A recommendation on a European site is expected to be announced this summer by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Pentagon officials say. The Pentagon has asked Congress for $56 million to begin work on the long-envisioned anti-missile system, a request that has some opposition in Congress. The final cost is estimated at $1.6 billion. The plan comes at a time of rising concerns about Iran’s suspected program to develop nuclear weapons.
Experts say Iran does not have intercontinental-range missiles and has yet to conduct a flight test of a multi-stage rocket. However, Tehran fired Scud ballistic missiles at Baghdad and Kirkuk during its war with Iraq in the 1980s.
The establishment of an anti-missile base in Eastern Europe would have enormous political implications. The deployment of US anti-missile interceptors in Poland, for example, would be the first permanent US military presence on that nation’s soil.
The Czech Ministry of Defense spokesman, Andrej Cirtek, said the Czech Republic had received “no concrete proposal” from the US for locating an anti-missile defense base on Czech soil.
While the plan has been described in congressional testimony and in published reports, it has received little attention in the United States. In Poland, however, it is a subject of lively discussion and has prompted Russian charges that Washington wishes to expand the US presence in the ex-Warsaw Pact nation.
The program is not without US critics who say it is behind schedule and cannot meet even this limited challenge.
“It has been doing very poorly,” Philip Coyle, the former head of the Pentagon’s Office of Operational Test and Evaluation, told the Times. “They have not had a successful flight intercept test for four years.”
In a separate article on relations between the United States, Iran and Europe, the Times reported that four of the biggest European banks have started curbing their activities in Iran following US threats of fines and lost business.
The newspaper says four banks — UBS and Credit Suisse banks of Switzerland, ABN Amro of the Netherlands, and London-based HSBC — have made varying levels of disclosures about the limits of their activities in Iran.
