Do You Think Putin Will Buy This Missile Defense Idea?

Some one please reassure me that this idea of a Missile Defense Shield in Poland is a rational foreign policy gambit on the part of the Cheney-Bush administration.

I want to believe it is. Really, I do. But I have to fess up to not being able to suspend my disbelief on this concept.

In the first place, I've never been a believer in the anti-missile defense project, other than as it functions as a myth deterring attackers. In other words, being able to shoot someone's bullet down out of the sky with your own bullet is not as important as getting other people to believe that you can. I haven't done any research on this, but I think the plausibility of anti-ballistic missile defense has always been a uniquely American obsession. As I recall, the subject of Condi Rice's speech, scheduled for 11-Sept-2001 but never presented or released, was on Star Wars. (Life is what happens when great plans are interrupted.)

This morning the BBC is carrying a story that Condi Rice is carrying someone's coals to Moscow to the effect that the U.S.-proposed missile shield in Poland is necessary to protect Europe from missile attacks from the Middle East? I thought she came into government a specialist in Russian studies. Right? Can she - of all people - believe that she can find Russians stupid enough to fall for this line? The Poles don't, for sure. Neither do the Slovaks. They differ on the issue, but their discussion is all about Russo-European tensions.

So, in desperation I have to ask, is this not just another distortion of rational U.S. foreign policy, spinning off as a derivative of our predicament in I-Rock and I-Ruin? Tell me it ain't so?