Wonks Anonymous is not pleased to report that the sorry saga of corruption and graft that he first reported in Huntsville Pork in this very blog continues.   After bravely saving the Strategic Defense Initiative from the lack of enthusiasm of the Clinton administration the Air Force is once again in action defending this vital boondoggle from potential harm from another Democratic administration.

The reader will recall that this program, also known as Star Wars,  has managed to spend considerable amounts of borrowed money while producing maybe one or two missile interceptions under carefully controlled conditions.  Meaning that we shot the missiles at ourselves and then managed to shoot them down - mostly except for the ones that we missed. This from an AP story posted in today's times

The Air Force general who runs the Pentagon's missile defense projects said Wednesday that American interests would be ''severely hurt'' if President-elect Obama decided to halt plans developed by the Bush administration to install missile interceptors in Eastern Europe.
. . .

A key question for the new president will be whether to proceed with the Bush administration's plans to install 10 missile interceptors in Poland and a missile-tracking radar in the Czech Republic. That system is on track to be ready for use by 2014, Obering said. It is strongly opposed by Russia, which sees it as an unwelcome military threat close to its borders; the Bush administration says it is needed to defend European allies against an emerging missile threat from Iran.

Obering said he is confident in the technology needed to make the European leg of the missile defense system work.

''In terms of any recommendations for the future, I would say that if we were to walk away from these proposed deployments to Europe, that it would severely hurt, number one, our ability to protect our deployed forces in that region and our allies and friends from what we see as an emerging threat. Number two, I think it would severely undermine U.S. leadership in NATO.''

For some reason the Russians consider this to be provocative. Of course if Russia placed missiles in Cuba to defend Venezuela from an attack by NATO we would understand.

Now the Poles and the Czechs have no reason to love the Russians and are, no doubt, having a grand time thumbing their noses at them under our protection. Wonks Anonymous has his doubts that anyone else in Europe is particularly enchanted by the idea of missile defense against a not yet materialized threat from Iran.

But the Poles and Czechs and even the Europeans hardly matter in this discussion. More important is the distribution of hundreds of millions of federal dollars to defense contractors to support highly paid jobs throughout the 50 states. It might be nice if we could cooperate with the Russians on the many challenges to international peace and security that we now face. We might actually get something done in the Middle East, Ukraine and Georgia but that is really much less important than assuring a steady supply of defense pork to key congressional districts.