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Richard Cochrane is trained in chemistry and metallurgy but is far more interested and practiced as a political and fund raising consultant, writer and amateur historian. He grew up in a Navy family and with his two younger brothers carried on its 500+ year tradition of naval service to Great Britain and the USA then enjoyed a career with one of the largest advertising and public relations agencies working with numerous Fortune 500 companies and many of America's premier educational institutions. He maintains friendships and acquaintanceships around the world. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

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Poland Tired Of Obama Using It As Bargaining Chip: Wants Clear Answer On US Missiles.

June 16th, 2009 • Richard Cochrane
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polandPoland wants a clear answer from Obama on plans to deploy part of a US anti-missile shield and a battery of Patriot missiles on Polish soil under a 2008 deal, the Polish government said Friday.

“We’re still lacking an essential, clear response as to whether the United States will go ahead with the shield plan. It’s a fundamental question to which we need a definite answer,” government spokesman Pawel Gras said on the Polish rolling news station TVN24.

“On our side we’ve met the pledges in this deal. The land (for the base) is ready and waiting,” he said.

After more than a year of painstaking negotiations, Warsaw and Washington struck a deal in 2008 on deploying 10 long-range interceptor missiles in Poland.

According to the previous US administration of George W. Bush the system — meant to be in operation by 2013, and also including a powerful targeting radar in the Czech Republic — was aimed to help foil threats from what it dubbed “rogue states” citing Iran.

Moscow is enraged by the plans in its Soviet-era “sphere of influence,” and threatened to train nuclear warheads on Poland and the Czech Republic, which broke free from the communist bloc in 1989 and joined NATO 10 years later.

In 2008, Warsaw and Washington signed a related accord on boosting Poland’s air defenses by deploying Patriot missiles.

Gras underlined that Warsaw was still waiting for the “United States to make good on the promise by the new administration, independently of the shield plan, to deploy a battery of Patriot missiles”.

In April, Obama said he would move forward with the missile defense plan as long as a missile threat from Iran persisted. But he said the system must be cost-effective and proven to work. Most see that as waffling and a kowtow to the Russians with whom Obama is trying to negotiate START II. For their part Russia, and specifically Putin has been playing Obama like a fiddle watching him dance marionette-like to his tune.

Last month Obama insisted it would push ahead with the Patriot deployment regardless of what happened to the anti-missile plan.

But Poland has since been riled by the US side, the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita reported.

Rzeczpospolita said that the United States had proposed to temporarily transfer a Patriot battery to Poland, destined only for exercises.

Speaking in Brussels on Friday, Poland’s Defense Minister Bogan Klich underlined that Warsaw wanted “a fully-equipped battery which could be integrated into the operational air-defence system”.

Poland is not an “arms fair” where the US can deploy shop-window hardware, Klich was quoted as saying by Poland’s PAP news agency.

The Czech Republic pulled its part of the plan away from a vote concened with Obama’s fragmented and inconclusive foreign p9olicy strtagy. Last weekends Iranian election complicated matters,

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  1. Comment by nahummer on 16 June 2009:

    Well, as long as we’re all clear, Rzeczpospolita is about the equivalent of say, ABC in Spain or I don’t even know in America, lacking a national type newspaper besides, whatever USA Today serves as. Best used as toilet paper, or reading material for the intellectually, morally or downright idiotic folk, it’s the national newspaper equivalent of say ‘Faux’ News more or less.
    Ok, maybe I went a bit too far there.
    I’ll do everything in my power, limited though it is, to keep those ‘Patriots’ out of the country I’m living in.

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