By Richard Sisk
The War Report

Turkey signed off on placing high-powered U.S. anti-missile radars on its soil today in a surprise move aimed at putting pressure on Iran and, by proxy, Syria.

Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Selcuk Unal said “The deployment of this (missile defense) element in Turkey will constitute our contribution to the defense system being developed within the new NATO strategy and will strengthen the defense potential of NATO as well as our national defense system.”

Iran quickly lashed out, charging that the missile umbrella was a sop to Israel while trying to maintain its close economic ties to Turkey.

“The measure aims at supporting the Zionist regime and protecting it against its crimes,” Ramin Mehmanparast, a spokesman for tbe Iranian Foreign Ministry, told the official ISNA news agency. The spokesman said his government had expressed its concerns to Turkey – “our friend and neighboring country.”

Turkey had long opposed the placement of anti-missile systems on its territory. Only last month, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said he would not agree to host a missile shield that targeted Iran. “Mentioning one country, Iran, is wrong and will not happen,” Gul said.

But Turkey has also repeatedly called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to call off his bloody crackdown on dissent. The move against Iran, Assad’s lone remaining ally in the region, could be seen as sending another message to Damascus.

The figleaf for the Turks was NATO’s description of the shield as protecting against a general missle threat, without mention of Iran.

But the allies have also warned that Iran has stepped up testing of new long-range missiles that could hit European capitals. “We’ve made no secret of the fact that Iran’s system is of concern,” a Pentagon spokesman said.

At a Lisbon summit of the allies last year, the U.S. won approval from NATO, and also Russia, to put parts of the system in Poland and Romania.

The radars in Turkey, expected to come on line by the end of the year, would send warning signals of a launch and tracking data to U.S. cruisers and destroyers in the Mediterraniean equipped with the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System. The Aegis system is designed to lock onto an incoming missile and launch its own missile to shoot it down.

Turkey’s agreement came only two days after the latest test failure for the Aegis system in the Pacific. A Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) interceptor missile launched from the cruiser Lake Erie failed to hit a target missile that had been sent up from a Navy test range in Kauai, Hawaii, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency reported. ”Program officials will conduct an extensive investigation to determine the cause of the failure to intercept,” the Agency said.

The Agency said that Aegis systems have been successful in 22 of 27 attempts at shooting down a missile, but critics have questioned the way the tests were conducted.

The most successful use of an SM-3 missile was not in a test but in a launch in 2008 that destroyed an out-of-control satellite that threatened to fall back to Earth.