He's Big in Tehran!

StrategyPage quotes an Barack Obama speech from a while back:

“I’m the only major candidate who opposed this war from the beginning; and as president, I will end it.

“Second, I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.

“I will institute an independent defense priorities board to ensure that the Quadrennial Review is not used to justify unnecessary defense spending.

“Third, I will set a goal for a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal, I will not develop nuclear weapons; I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material; and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert, and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal.”

Let’s take these point by point.

The US Army, Marines, and the Iraqi Army are already ending the war. They’re doing so through a process called “winning.” Of course, Obama only just last week finally won his own battle against a second-rate candidate in a fight he probably could have “ended” months ago. So in all fairness, winning might not be a concept he has a whole lot of familiarity with.

Obama will, in all likelihood, also cut back or eliminate proven anti-missile systems. The other problem is, how do unproven systems become proven, without spending money and time on them? Obama would, at best, keep our extremely limited ABM systems where they are now — extremely limited. Most likely, however, he’d cut us back from “we’ve got some stuff that works” to “we had some stuff that worked.”

And if you’ll allow me to paraphrase the second part of Obama’s second point: “I promise to second-guess the Pentagon’s second-guessers.”

About his last point: We’d all love a world without nukes. But does Obama really think he’ll get us there by having a little chat with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Meanwhile, StrategyPage reports that the Pentagon is doing all it can to prepare for Obama’s promised cutbacks.

Best of luck, fellas.