Under the old plan, the U.S. would have deployed 10 large, costly ($70 million each) missile interceptors in Poland, linked to a large radar in the Czech Republic, to defend principally the United States against the possibility that Iran could someday develop intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The new plan uses a greater number of less costly missiles ($10 million each), initially deployed on ships rather than on land in eastern Europe, starting immediately. Despite these advantages, the decision was "a great error,'' Sen. Jeff Sessions declared on the Senate floor.

The Alabama Republican added that he was "flabbergasted'' at this presidential perfidy. His GOP colleague from Oklahoma, James Inhofe, noticed that Europe was suddenly "naked'' to an Iranian juggernaut. Especially fulsome was the reaction of former Massachusetts governor and GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, who declared it "a dangerous and alarming decision'' that cruelly abandoned "the Eastern Europeans who have stood by so valiantly with America.'' Romney even managed to include Honduras in the list of injured parties, although it wasn't immediately clear that Latin America is a top priority target of the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran.

Few commentators acknowledged that the old scheme, devised by the Pentagon under President Bush, would have provided absolutely no protection against Iran's missiles until 2017 at the earliest, and then would have installed missiles intended to intercept up to 10 long-range ballistic missiles.

The threat, meantime, had changed, with Iran's increasing ability to launch salvoes of short- and medium-range missiles – "hundreds,'' said James Cartwright, the four-star Marine general who is vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Most at risk from a blizzard of Iranian missiles: Israel, U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, America's Persian Gulf allies (think, oil fields), and southern Europe. Even as some were gnashing their teeth at this "abandonment'' of the European allies, U.S. guided missile cruisers and destroyers armed with SM-3 missile interceptors were moving into position, in places like the eastern Mediterranean and the South China Sea, against missile threats from Iran and North Korea.

More such ships, tied into land-based radars, are being deployed. And if the threat develops as intelligence agencies predict, this anti-missile system will thicken and deepen to include land-based missiles in Europe. [Israel is building a muscular, three-tiered missile defense system with U.S. technical cooperation.] All this was explained in detail Sept. 17, when Obama announced his decision. But it's taken until now for the critics' baying to fall silent.

On Friday, the White House revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies have been monitoring a secret Iranian uranium enrichment plant deep underground in a Revolutionary Guards base near Qom, collapsing Iranian claims that its nuclear efforts are entirely peaceful. U.S. intelligence officials say when the plant is completed, it could produce enough fissile material for a bomb every year.

News of the secret Iranian facility noticeably stiffened the willingness of Russia and others to impose severe additional banking and trade sanctions on the Iranian regime. (The Kremlin was in a friendlier mood because the Obama administration's redesign of the missile defense system eliminated proposed radar that would have peered deep into Russian territory.)

Then on Sunday and Monday, as the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany prepared for a showdown meeting with Iran in Geneva Thursday, Iran obliged by firing off salvoes of short- and medium-range missiles. A senior Revolutionary Guards officer, Abdullah Araqi, was quoted by the Iranian news agency as boasting that Iran's missiles could strike "any place that threatens Iran.'' Western sources gave the estimated range of the medium-range missiles, the Shahab-3 and the solid-fuel Sejil-2, as between 800 and 1,250 miles, a range sufficient to hit Israel and some of western Europe. [In our for What It's Worth department, a senior Iranian official insisted that Iran's growing missile capability is entirely defensive, according to foreign policy analyst Juan Cole.

In a translation by the U.S. Open Source Center cited by Cole, Gen. Hoseyn Salami, commander of the Revolutionary Guards Air Force, said Monday, "as long as our enemies act within a political domain, our behavior will be completely political. However, if they want to leave the domain of political action and enter the domain of military threat, then our action will be exactly and completely military."] The week's events swept away the chattering naysayers of the new Obama missile defense plan, and appeared to give the administration a more powerful hand heading into Thursday's Geneva talks than it had just two weeks ago. It's impossible to predict what will emerge from that historic encounter -- whether Iran will blanch or bristle at the prospect of further economic sanctions. In the longer run, according to analysts such as Barry Rubin, the steady build-up of missile defenses in the current Pentagon plan seems to be a good bet. A good one, if not the only one, for there seems to be no single silver bullet in the confrontation with revolutionary Iran. It appears that the main effect of economic sanctions, so far, has been to complicate life for ordinary Iranians by making gasoline and other imports ruinously expensive.

As Rubin points out, the combination of missile defenses, sanctions and the explicit or tacit threat of military force offers the best way to contain Iran. "It is far more likely to be effective than the sadly weak diplomatic sanction defense offered by divided and timid western countries,'' he observes.