Bioweapons proliferation policy: stupid is as stupid does

While you busy being scared by the Bush administration about phantom weapons of mass destruction, there are real WMDs and have been for many decades. We even know where they are (no, not north, west and south of Tikrit, as claimed by the cowardly Donald Rumsfeld). They are in the former Soviet Union. They made bioweapons. They had stockpiles. They even had a well-studied accident with anthrax from a weapons research facility that killed dozens of community residents when a fairly small amount was inadvertently vented in Sverdlovsk. But Putin's Russia is not a target in George Bush's "Global" War on Terror. Global doesn't mean everywhere, it turns out. It means only the places on Bush's foreign policy radar screen:

The U.S. government is ending its support for former bioweapons scientists in Russia in favor of a similar but larger initiative in parts of the world that it considers potentially more dangerous to global security.

Nonproliferation experts aren't happy about the move, which State Department officials say is prompted by improving economic conditions in Russia and a rising threat in eastern and central Asia and the Middle East. There are also private grumblings at the Department of Defense, which is scaling back its own efforts because of difficulties that DOD officials have had in accessing Russian labs. (Science)

The State Department's reasoning is that the economy of Russia is now so good that no one will be forced or tempted to sell bioweapons by virute of an unstable economy.

As a result, [Jason Rao, senior coordinator for Cooperative Threat Reduction at the State Department] says, the United States can now get down to its "fighting weight" in the region and turn to places such as Pakistan, Philippines, Indonesia, and the Middle East, where a combination of transnational terrorists and emerging infectious diseases such as avian influenza pose new risks.

So the State Department is slashing the budget to support Russian biologists formerly in weapons work by two-thirds. The savings is paltry in the DoD budget: $5 million. Less than 20 minutes of the Iraq debacle. By the time you open this scan it and move on to the next thing DoD will have spent almost that much.

Could they be this stupid and incompetent? Just look at the last six and a half years.