Open note to Fred Hiatt: You are a total neocon hack job.

I don’t know how Hiatt ended up as the editorial page editor at the Washington Post, and I suppose this ends my chances of placing any op-eds at the Post in the near future, but to hell with it. And so much for the “new” Arms Control Wonk.

Lots of other folks — Andrew Sullivan among them — have documented the steady rightward list of the Post editorial page since Hiatt took the helm.

What set me off today is a small thing, but precisely because it is such a small, ordinary slight, I find Hiatt’s latest shenanigan to be very telling about how the Post does business these days. (And I don’t mean apparently selling access to the newsroom.)

On Monday, July 6, Eric Edelman and Henry “Trey” Obering had a predictably silly oped about the Iranian missile threat in the Post (Defense For a Real Threat). They are entitled to their opinion. Opinons, as my Dad would say, are like belly-buttons: Everyone’s got one. (Ok, he didn’t say “belly-buttons”.)

There are at least three things that bother me about the Post’s decision to run the op-ed:

One (1) The op-ed is just a smear against the EastWest Institute’s very interesting Joint Threat Assessment. Why Hiatt is pimping inches in the Post to people like Edelman and Obering to use in settling some stupid personal score is beyond me.

Make no mistake, Edelman and Obering have some axe to grind — right down to putting scare quotes around “experts” to describe the Joint Threat Assessment participants. Step back for a second and consider that: Trey Obering is questioning the technical chops of, among others, Richard Garwin.

Garwin received the National Medal of Science. Obering can’t count to eleven without taking his shoes off. But I digress.

Garwin obviously was evidently bemused by all this. His byline in the response that he circulated with Ted Postol merely lists his qualification as being “a long-time contributor to U.S. military technology.”

This is like Michael Jordan noting that he “played some ball.”

Two (2) Edelman and Obering, by all accounts, should love the idea of a Joint Threat Assessment, not trash it.

The EastWest Institute Joint Threat Assessment did wonders in bringing Russians experts around to a realistic assessment of the short- and medium-range ballistic missile threat from Iran, as well as Tehran’s nuclear program.

That it didn’t convince the Russians of some bizarre neo-con fixation with ICBMs and Scuds-on-ships (anybody else remember Scuds-on-ships?) is not a short-coming.

Getting the Russians to join in a Joint Threat Assessment, as opposed to their typical ostrich-maneuver about Iran, is a fantastic idea — which is why some serious senior people like General James Jones endorsed the concept of a Joint Threat Assessment. Indeed, that is also why Obama sought and won a pledge from Russian President Medvedev for Russian experts to participate in an official Joint Threat Assessment.

The fact that Edelman and Obering don’t see the value in working to bring the Russians around to our point of view is a perfect example of why US leadership languished while those two were on the job. You’re either with us or against us. Coalitions of the willing. You get the idea.

Three (3) Hiatt and the Post refused to run a response by Dick Garwin and Ted Postol, who were among the six American participants (aka “experts”). Now that is just cowardly.

(Update: I should note that the Post published a short letter by Garwin.)

You run a second-rate hack job by the two rocket scientists like Edelman and Obering — that’s sarcasm — and you don’t let their victims (who happen to actually be scientists of one form or other) rebut?

Garwin and Postol, by the way, are circulating the response. Here is the full text.

The Wrong Defense and the Wrong Target
by
Richard L. Garwin and Theodore A. Postol
July 8, 2009

Trey Obering and Eric Edelman misrepresent the findings of an East-West Institute study done by a team of Russian and US experts on Iran’s Nuclear and Ballistic Missile Programs and then use these misrepresentations to make arguments that are without merit. They claim that a recently tested Iranian solid propellant ballistic missile represents a threat to Europe (“putting much of Europe within range”) and imply that the Czech radar and Polish interceptors can counter it when in fact the missile is of too short a range to reach most European capitals and even to be engaged by the European missile defense system they advocate.

They also claim that our report incorrectly identifies and discusses serious limitations of the European Midcourse Radar that Gen. Obering was involved in advocating for the Czech Republic when he was director of the Missile Defense Agency. Our study found that the range of this radar against warheads is so short that it cannot provide even rudimentary discrimination capabilities against warheads and decoys launched from Iran to the eastern two thirds of the continental United States and Northern and Western Europe.

Obering and Edelman state that the radar “has been operated in flight tests in the South Pacific for more than eight years.” What they do not say is that the radar was of such short range that it could only be tested against realistic mock warheads at ranges of a few hundred kilometers, where the actual intercept attempts occurred after long-range missiles had already flown thousands of miles to arrive near the radar.

We have recommended to the National Security Adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, that the real capabilities of this radar get high-level technical attention in the president’s Missile Defense Review. If this radar does not have the range to discriminate between warheads and decoys, it will mean that the Missile Defense Agency has committed to a radar that would leave two thirds of the eastern part of the continental United States, as well as Northern and Western Europe, with a defense that cannot tell the difference between warheads and countermeasures so simple that it is impossible to believe they would not, and could not, be used.

The other findings of the East-West Institute Study are also relevant to Obering’s and Edelman’s claims of a dire threat from Iran that requires the immediate adoption of a flawed and untested missile defense system. They are:

- A ballistic missile can only be a nuclear threat if the adversary has a nuclear weapon that the missile can carry.

- The time it would take Iran to have a roughly 2000 km range ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead is determined by the time it would take Iran to build a nuclear warhead that is sufficiently light and compact to fly on a ballistic missile. Assuming Iran does not have clandestine enrichment capabilities, it would take Iran about six years to produce such a weapon – starting from the time they expel the International Atomic Energy Agency from their currently monitored nuclear enrichment facilities.

- In the event that Iran could build longer-range missiles that could reach Northern and Western Europe or the United States, they would be very large and cumbersome, and would have to be launched from well-known specialized launch locations. Such missiles would be highly vulnerable to preemption and, as described in our report, to small interceptor missiles based on stealthy drone aircraft to shoot down the lumbering missiles as they are launched.

Unlike the European missile defense, this defense is not subject to countermeasures. We like it, because we like weapons that work!

Richard L. Garwin is a long-time contributor to U.S. military technology.

Theodore A. Postol is Professor of Science, Technology, and national Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.