Sikorski Also Urges Strong Support For NATO

By Marina Malenic and Dave Ahearn

A top Polish official yesterday urged President-elect Obama, who takes office Jan. 20, and his administration to continue plans for installing ballistic missile defense interceptors in his country.

"Naturally, we would like to see this project continue," Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, told the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C.

The Bush administration signed deals with executive leaders in Poland and the Czech Republic to install the European Missile Defense (EMD) system on their territories as the third leg of the U.S. Ground-based Midcourse Defense system now installed in Alaska and California. And NATO, too, has approved the EMD.It will include interceptors in ground silos in Poland, and a radar in the Czech Republic.

But the Czech and Polish parliaments have yet to give final approval to the deal. The U.S. Congress has said no funds may be used for site construction of the EMD until those parliaments grant approval.

The EMD is aimed primarily at enemy missiles launched out of Middle Eastern nations such as Iran.

But Russian leaders allege that the EMD could threaten their intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

Russia has voiced loud and frequent opposition to the plan, with President Dmitry Medvedev most recently threatening to deploy a short-range missile system in the Kaliningrad region bordering Poland and Lithuania in response to the potential U.S. basing. Since then, while on the world stage at a Group of 20 Nations meeting, Medvedev backed off somewhat from his threat, saying he wouldn’t deploy the Iskander missiles until and unless the United States installed the EMD, a system developed by The Boeing Co. [BA].

Sikorski called Medvedev’s belligerent threat, uttered just after Obama won the U.S. presidential election Nov. 4, a "mistake."

"I think to welcome the new U.S. president and [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] allies of the U.S. with missiles was a mistake," Sikorski said.

The U.S. missile defense system "would enhance American presence in Europe and produce strong ties between central Europe and the U.S.," he added. "Let me also note that NATO has agreed that such a system will be useful for the protection of Europe against a possible ballistic missile threat."

NATO leaders see the U.S. EMD shield against long-range missile threats as complementary to an emergent NATO missile defense against short- and medium-range threats.

However, Obama and congressional Democrats have advocated detailed testing before any final decision to deploy the system. And Congress also has ordered tests of the EMD interceptors before they can be deployed, a move that might delay the program perhaps two years. The EMD interceptors would be variants of the GMD interceptors already deployed in the United States, with the main difference being that the EMD interceptors would have one less rocket stage.

A bipartisan congressional delegation from the House Armed Services Committee is scheduled to visit Russia, the Czech Republic, and Poland next month.

While Russian leaders have alleged the EMD interceptors would be able to defeat Russian ICBMs, or alleging the interceptors could be fitted with nuclear warheads to convert them to American ICBMs, U.S. leaders have said such claims are rubbish. They note the interceptors aren’t fast enough to catch Russian ICBMs. And there are hundreds of Russian nuclear weapons and ICBMs, versus the 10 interceptors that would go in Poland.

Further, Sikorski said Poland is willing to open the potential interceptor site to a stringent inspections regime to reassure Moscow of its intent.

"We are willing to go almost but not quite to the permanent stationing of Russian personnel in Poland," he said. "The permanent stationing of Russian troops on our soil is something the public is sensitive about," he said. Poland for decades was a slave state subjugated by the former Soviet Union. "But we would like to give…the kind of inspection rights and the kind of monitoring that to any reasonable person would give complete assurance" that the silos in Poland don’t house nuclear-tipped ICBMs.

Some Russian generals have raised concerns about nuclear warheads being added to the interceptor missiles, and Sikorski said frequent inspections could dispel such rumors.

Sikorski also called for a reinvigoration of NATO, particularly in the face of a resurgent Russia.

"Over the last several years, NATO has transformed itself to meet the new challenges of the transatlantic community. It has expanded its mission beyond the treaty territory, taking on new commitments in places like the Balkans, Iraq and most notably Afghanistan," he said.

"Developing new expeditionary capabilities has been part of NATO’s transformation. While we are ready to continue our engagement in Afghanistan, we feel that the time has come to renew the essential role of NATO," he added. "NATO should recover its traditional role, not just as an alliance, but as a military organization — and once again devote a portion of its energy to the treaty area."

He called for better intelligence sharing, war gaming and contingency planning "that is not immobilized or gutted by political correctness."

"We need to make the NATO guarantee credible again," Sikorski said.

He also welcomed military basing in Poland beyond the missile defense interceptors.

"The NATO infrastructure should be more evenly spread over its territory," he said. "That is not to provoke anybody, just that this is the way an alliance should grow."

For Poland, if it had U.S. and NATO forces stationed on its soil, that might make Russia cautious about any move to invade Poland. Former Soviet puppet states that broke free of rule by Moscow have become concerned by the Russian move to invade Georgia.