If there’s one thing that missile defense zealots can’t stand, it’s the implementation of missile defense plans. Josh Rogin reports:

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gets to Istanbul on Friday, senators and their staffs will be watching closely to see if she moves the ball forward on an agreement to station U.S. missile defense radar there, an agreement many Republicans oppose.

“We write with concern over recent reports that the administration may be nearing completion of a bilateral agreement with the Turkish Government to base a U.S. AN/TPY-2 (X-Band) radar in Turkey,” wrote Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) in a July 12 letter to Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta obtained by The Cable.

The senators want the radar to be based in either Georgia or Azerbaijan, which they argue are better locations for defending against a missile attack from Iran. But more broadly, they are concerned that Ankara will place a number of onerous restrictions on the radar, such as demanding that no data be shared with Israel. The senators have also accused Turkey of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, which they said calls into question their reliability as a partner in organizing a missile defense system aimed at Tehran.

There are a few points to make here. First, I have to note with some amusement that the Azerbaijan suggestion is one that was originally proposed by no less than Vladimir Putin as an alternative to the now-cancelled installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. Azerbaijan already feels neglected and ill-used by the U.S., and it’s not obvious that the way to remedy that is to ask it to take an adversarial stance towards its next-door neighbor. The idea of putting a missile defense installation in Georgia is obviously a non-starter for political reasons. Perhaps most important is the small matter than neither Georgia nor Azerbaijan is part of NATO. For that matter, Georgia has been trying to cultivate improved ties with Iran for several years now, and it can afford to antagonize Iran much less than Turkey. It wouldn’t be doing Georgia any favors to put the radar there, and it would needlessly increase U.S.-Russian and Russian-Georgian tensions. The entire exercise is rather pointless, since there isn’t much of an Iranian missile threat to defend against, but that’s all the more reason not to set up the system in a way that’s bound to create political problems for all parties involved.