PROBABLY NOT WHAT JOE KLEIN WAS LOOKING FOR:

U.S. Missile U-Turn Roils Allies (MARC CHAMPION and PETER SPIEGEL, 9/19/09, WSJ)

[S]ome prominent figures in the region, such as former Polish President Lech Walesa, worried the new U.S. administration was turning away from its traditional allies in Central Europe to placate Russia. "It's not that we need the shield, but it's about the way we're treated here," Mr. Walesa said on Polish TV.

"Putting a facility on Czech and Polish soil was symbolically, for the U.S. and NATO, extremely important to those countries, and to the former Soviet satellite countries like them," said Mary Beth Long, who as an assistant secretary of defense during the Bush administration was involved in promoting the system to allies in Europe. [...]

Moscow doesn't see abandonment of the Bush administration's missile plans as a concession to respond to, but as "a mistake that is now being corrected," said Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to NATO, in a phone interview in Brussels, repeating rhetoric from Moscow in the days before the Thursday's announcement.

"This is a recognition by the Americans of the rightness of our arguments about the reality of the threat, or rather the lack of one," from Iran's missiles, Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the international affairs committee of Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, told state television. "Finally the Americans have agreed with us," he said.

Poles, Czechs: US missile defense shift a betrayal: Poles and Czechs voiced deep concern Friday at President Barack Obama's decision to scrap a Bush-era missile defense shield planned for their countries. (VANESSA GERA, 9/18/09, Associated Press)

"Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back," the Polish tabloid Fakt declared on its front page.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski said he was concerned that Obama's new strategy leaves Poland in a dangerous "gray zone" between Western Europe and the old Soviet sphere.

Recent events in the region have rattled nerves throughout central and eastern Europe, a region controlled by Moscow during the Cold War, including the war last summer between Russia and Georgia and ongoing efforts by Russia to regain influence in Ukraine. A Russian cutoff of gas to Ukraine last winter left many Europeans without heat.

The Bush administration's plan would have been "a major step in preventing various disturbing trends in our region of the world," Kaczynski said in a guest editorial in the daily Fakt and also carried on his presidential Web site.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 18, 2009 6:09 AM