Obama and the Missile

As I'm sure everyone who's taking the time to read this post knows, over the weekend North Korea fired it's much bally-hooed ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan. Success or failure aside, although I think it's silly to argue that this was somehow a failure for North Korea, I'm wondering why the United States didn't shoot this missile down.

As our illustrious Vice President told us during the campaign, President Obama, like any new President, is going to be tested in the first six months of office. This was a test, and our new President failed miserably. Now before you say, "Oh you just hate Obama because he's a democrat and you're racist and blah blah blah blah...." I want Obama to succeed in the foreign policy arena, as I think every American does. Foreign policy failures carry a great cost in both world standing and wealth, and I don't think any American is rooting for that. Having said that and being a free market, freedom loving, anti-government conservative, I hope that every one of his domestic policies fails miserably. I mean, "explodes in a ball of flames" type failure. But that is neither here nor there....

Wanting Obama to succeed overseas, I can't see this as anything but a failure. Shooting down the missile would have established Obama as a no-nonsense guardian of the free world, a President who is willing to negotiate but who refuses to be taken advantage of. That action would have sent a message to everyone in the world who is thinking of fingering their noses at the United States. Instead now the world sees that the United States will allow itself to be handcuffed by the UN, and that the most stern response you can expect from the Obama administration is a strongly worded letter.

So again I ask why? I mean one could say that Obama is trying to get away from the "Cowboy Diplomacy" of the Bush years, but I don't think that fits. I mean, it's not like North Korea is a member in good standing of the world community. Nobody likes what they're doing, and I don't think anyone except Kim Jong Il would have objected if we had blown the missile out of the sky.

Some would say that we couldn't have hit it, but I don't buy that either. I'm not saying that it was a slam dunk, but Admiral Keating of the US Navy was confident that we could take it out. I know Defense Secretary Gates tried to put that genie back in the bottle, but I am a bit skeptical of his statements as they had time to be processed by the White House spin machine. And in the end would we have been that much worse off had we missed? At least we would have tried to do something.

Although I'm not going to do it here, there are still some other reasons for not shooting it down that could be considered. I'm not going to do it because I think there is only one that makes sense. Obama could let our missile defense shield succeed. Think about it, what is the first commandment of the modern democrat party? "Everything George Bush did was stupid and wrong." This missile shield was pushed by George Bush and made viable under GW. One of Obama's campaign promises was to stop spending money on unproven missile defense technologies, even though they weren't unproven at all. In fact, they had been proven to be remarkably successful. Obama remarked during the campaign that the missile defense shield was a relic of the Cold War, and that a ballistic missile attack was no longer a threat to the US. This entire incident proves this to be untrue.

So let's say that North Korea launches and we shoot it down. After a success of that visibility and magnitude, how easy would it be to dismantle the missile shield? Impossible, or maybe even slightly harder. Obama is going to destroy that missile shield, and so he couldn't shoot down the missile.

At least that's what I think. What about you?