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xchrom

(108,903 posts) Sat Aug 10, 2013, 07:19 AM Aug 2013

While Obama's Snubbing Putin, How About Ending This Terrible Defense Contract, Too?

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/while-obamas-snubbing-putin-how-about-ending-this-terrible-defense-contract-too/278537/

Putin and Obama meet at the G8 Summit at Lough Erne in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Now that President Obama is taking a break from Russian President Vladimir Putin, he should revisit another wildly dysfunctional piece of their relationship: The $1.1 billion contract for U.S. taxpayers to buy helicopters for Afghanistan from the same Russian arms dealer that's supplying Syria's Bashar al Assad.

The deal was conceived in the glow of the 2010 "reset" of U.S.-Russia relations with then-President Dmitri Medvedev. It looked appealing at the time, since the Mi-17 chopper was cheap and could fly "hot and high missions" in Afghanistan.

Now that the U.S.-Russian relationship status has been updated to "it's complicated," here are 10 reasons to dump the exclusive, no-bid contract with Russia and start playing the field:

1. The Pentagon's contractual partner is the Russian state-owned arms dealer, Rosoboronexport, which hasn't stopped supplying weapons to Assad. Russia hasn't even promised not to send S-300 advanced weapons systems that could destabilize the region and make it nearly impossible to establish a no-fly zone over Syria. (Which is, of course, why Putin won't promise not to sell them.)