Or if its about protecting our occupying forces in the region, bringing them home accomplishes that, and much more cost efficient.

In the long run, however, this will have the effect of improving the historically strained relation between Poland and Russia.  

and instead deploy a reconfigured system aimed more at intercepting shorter-range Iranian missiles,

Laying aside the fact that we have just taught Russia that we can be pushed around......

The purpose of the missile system was to intercept missiles from Iran aimed at the US. (Look at a globe.)

Obama has just laid us open to nuclear blackmail and attack from Iran.

As for the missle shield, good, I suppose, but we still seem far too addicted to repeating our failures, both of strategy and hubris, to have it make much of a difference.  

I think the Bush Eastern Europe missle system was designed to antagonize Russia and rekindle the Cold War. When your political survival relies totally on fear, you can't have too many boogey men.

We have to prove that we can force the Taliban out of power and protect the Afghanistan people until they empower a government respectful of human rights.  This is no small order.  And if they suspect for a minute that we are going to ditch them like we did the Kurds we are only wasting our time there.

Like we already ditched them when we attempted this before, and gave rise to the first round of the Taliban? It isn't like we don't have a history of invading other countries for their own good, promoting freedom and democracy at gunpoint, and then bailing when things get bad.

Not that I think we should stay, because the idea that we can bring peace and prosperity to a foreign country by deploying bullets and bombs is naive, to say the least, and insane to say the most.

Chris Floyd, as usual, has the best analysis of all our misguided attempts to dominate other countries and the horror and misery that ensues. In this must-read installment he pulls heavily from the work of a Guardian reporter describing the aftermath of the recent NATO air strike, when the survivors couldn't identify the bodies of their loved ones because they were so horribly mangled:

...Jan Mohammad, an old man with a white beard and green eyes, said angrily: "I ran, I ran to find my son because nobody would give me a lift. I couldn't find him."

He dropped his head on his palm that was resting on the table, and started banging his head against his white mottled hand. When he raised his head his eyes were red and tears were rolling down his cheek: "I couldn't find my son, so I took a piece of flesh with me home and I called it my son. I told my wife we had him, but I didn't let his children or anyone see. We buried the flesh as it if was my son."

He says this is one reason he recommended scrapping plans to build a sophisticated radar system in the Czech Republic and installing ground-based interceptors in Poland.

Gates said shorter range Iranian missiles are a more urgent concern.

"The intelligence community now assesses that the threat from Iran's short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, such as the Shahab-3, is developing more rapidly than previously projected," said Robert Gates. " This poses an increased and more immediate threat to our forces on the European continent, as well as to our allies."

To counter that threat, the U.S. military will deploy Aegis ships equipped with missile interceptors along with radar surveillance sensors to counter the Iranian threat.

The next phase will involve fielding upgraded interceptors on land in Europe, possibly in Poland or the Czech Republic.

Secretary Gates said the new plan will allow flexibility and put in place a defense system more quickly than the previous proposal.

"Perhaps most important, though, we can now field initial elements of the system to protect our forces in Europe and our allies roughly six to seven years earlier than the previous plan - a fact made more relevant by continued delays in the Czech and Polish ratification processes that have caused repeated slips in the timeline," he said.

This is a cool Start, We need to forget ground based missile defense, and get into the future and deploy space based weapons. For all the Jokes and Bad SciFi analogies it really is posible to have space lasers. Also this is a funny video about military spending.