When the story broke last week that the Obama administration had
decided to alter its ballistic missile-defense plans in Europe, U.S. officials scrambled
to respond by arranging a hasty news briefing and press conference
Thursday morning.
On Wednesday evening, the Washington policy community was
aflutter with rumors that top Obama officials had embarked on a late-night
diplomatic journey to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Brussels to brief allies
on their plans to drastically alter the Bush administration's scheme to plant
long-range interceptor missiles only miles from Russian territory.
The administration had hoped to finish consulting with
allies before announcing the plan, but that idea was ruined by exactly the kind
of transatlantic rumor-mongering the administration was trying to avoid, one
senior official confirmed on the record to The
Cable.
"What happened was that some of the consultations that we
had abroad started creating some leaks with erroneous information about what
the plan was," said Michèle Flournoy,
under secretary of defense for policy, who traveled to Europe with Ellen O. Tauscher, under secretary of
state for arms control, and Alexander
Vershbow, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs,
to deliver the news.
"It started creating a dynamic of erroneous speculation and
reporting," Flournoy continued. "The president was very ready to make a
decision, so we decided that rather than have six weeks of erroneous
speculation, we would go ahead and roll out the decision and correct the record
for what this actually is."
Flournoy's remarks suggested that there might be something
to the rumors
that the leak came from Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, a former senior fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute, a think tank sympathetic to the Bush administration's original plan
for the European sites.
The news of the Obama administration's decision was first
broken on the blog
of the Weekly Standard, which shares
an office building with AEI, and then fleshed out shortly afterward on The Cable.
Although some allies may have not been fans of the missile-defense
overhaul, which scuttles Bush's scheme to place 10 ground-based interceptors in
Poland and an X-band radar in the Czech Republic and replaces them with mobile
short-range Standard Missiles, Flournoy promised that the new allies would not
be left aside.
"Both of these countries, we hope, will be critical parts of
the new infrastructure. They haven't lost anything and it also opens up
participation for a number of other countries."
"In the case of the Poles, we are just changing one missile
type for another, and we'll continue to deepen our defense cooperation in other
ways," she said. "In the case of the Czechs, we invited them to participate in
the new system. There are all kinds of ways, command and control nodes, ISR
nodes ... we're in discussions with them now."
The new design will be much cheaper and more effective than
the old one, said Flournoy. She also flatly rejected the charge that the
administration tried to make a deal with the Russians that involved canceling
the American missile-defense sites in Europe in exchange for Russian help in
dealing with Iran.
"Absolutely not true," Flournoy said, "This was not about
Russia, this was about a better and more adaptable defense of Europe and the
linkage that's implied there was totally false."
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