Sen. Kyl (R-AZ): Democrats have ignored missile defense

The American Foreign Policy Council hosted their second annual conference on missile defense.

The biggest themes from both Jim Woolsey, CIA director under Clinton and Sen. Jon Kyl were that we are moving away from a cold war way of thinking and a focus on negotiating with Russia and focusing on new threats from Iran, China, and North Korea.

Woolsey focused on the ideology that controls Iran and that it should be taken as seriously as Hitler. He advocated even stronger sanctions against Iran for example, cutting off their refined petroleum product such as diesel. He said that the United States should increase their outreach to citizen's in Iran who are displeased with the Amadinejad regime via broadcasting mediums like VOA. He said that caveats the National Intelligence Estimate in December had been ignored and those indicated that Iran continues to March toward developing nuclear weapons. Woolsey said if Iran continues to advance in it's nuclear development the only thing worse than the use of force would be to let Iran have a nuclear weapon.

Kyl went a bit more into Russian and Chinese threats and how a missile that travels through space to reach it's target is a "space weapon." He defended the recent shoot down of the broken US satellite as a good sign for US missile defense. Kyle was much more political saying that the Democrats have been failing in appropriate funding for missile defense. Sen. Kyl said that only John McCain would return solid funding to missile defense. He criticized a "mindset on Capitol Hill that we should be spending as much on the Peace Corps as missile defense." He called for studies on space based missile defense and full funding for missile defense. He said he feared that a new administration with the same person said we should eliminate money from the missile defense program.