The good news is that the United States is set to deploy a missile defense system capable of thwarting North Korean missile strikes. The bad news is that it’s about 6,000 miles from the United States.
The site of the new system, announced by the Pentagon last Friday, will be a U.S. military base in southern Japan. To be sure, this makes certain strategic sense. Although Japanese officials have long grumbled about America’s military presence in the country, North Korea’s recent test of the long-rage, Taepong 2 missile, which has the capacity to reach anywhere in Japan and potentially mainland United States, has made the prospect of American missile technology less objectionable. Placing missile defenses in the base thus serves the dual function of protecting American interests and a key U.S. ally.
Less comprehensible is why the state of American missile defense is arguably more advanced abroad than at home. Consider that the surface-to-air system deployed in Japan will be partially operational within a year’s time. By contrast, more than two decades after President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, ridiculed as "Star Wars" by Senator Ted Kennedy within hours of its inception, the goal of a comprehensive, integrated and reliable American missile defense system remains more of a hope than a reality.
In fairness, progress has been made, especially under the second Bush administration. A not insignificant measure is the fact that missile defense technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated. In the most recent test, this June, a Navy ship off the coast of Hawaii successfully intercepted a "separating target," military shorthand for a target warhead that separates from its booster rocket. The seventh successful test in eight months, it relied on a missile defense radar stationed on land, a strategic synchronicity that only a few short years ago was beyond the military's means.
But the problems persist. For one thing, the current missile defense system, comprising nine ground-based interceptor missiles in Alaska and two in California, as well as missiles on several Navy ships, is not fully operational. For another, it has an underwhelming average success rate in tests: about 50 percent, with land-based interceptor missiles (60-40 success rate) marginally more successful than their counterparts on Navy ships (50-50 success rate). One would hope for better odds to defend the justice of the American cause.
No less pressing is the political problem. Even as rogue states menace the international stage and terrorists plot attacks on American soil--FBI stings have netted several arms traffickers and would-be jihadists in the market for missiles in recent years--a pervasive and vocal lobby continues to denounce the common-sense missile defense program as the single greatest threat to international peace. Its ranks run to everyone from far-Left activists and aging nuclear-freeze advocates, unchastened by the West's decisive victory in the Cold War; to some congressional Democrats, driven by a reflexive disdain for military spending and partisan contempt for the Bush administration; to nuclear disarmament groups, who regard programs like missile defense as the main barrier to the dawn of international brotherhood that, but for the supposed belligerence of the United States and Israel, would be upon us. Not least, they include several prominent left-wing charities who are prepared to deploy their million-dollar budgets in the service of, in effect, making America more vulnerable to missile attacks.
Whatever else may be said of the far-Left, its line on missile defense is consistent with its ideological first principle: blame America first. Radical rabbi Michael Lerner, updating the Cold War-era narrative for the age of al-Qaeda, has said that if the U.S. "unilaterally cancels its treaties to not build a missile defense" then "it becomes far easier for the haters and the fundamentalists to recruit people who are willing to kill themselves in strikes against what they perceive to be an evil American empire represented by the Pentagon and the World Trade Center." Left-wing evangelical leader Jim Wallis, who spent the 1980s vilifying the Reagan administration as the "chief obstacle to the first step in stopping the arms race," still pledges his magazine, Sojourners, to the cause of disparaging missile defense.
The Democrats' position has historically been more nuanced. Indeed, the forerunner of today's missile defense program was proposed in 1967 by President Lynden Johnson. Called the Sentinel system, it would have placed nuclear-tipped interceptor missiles at fifteen sites across the country, including ten near major metropolitan areas. But Johnson lacked the will to see the project to fruition. Confronted with criticism that the program was too expensive, and unfounded speculation that it would be impossible to realize, Johnson dramatically reduced the scope of the program.
It would become a recurring pattern under Democratic presidents. Take the Clinton administration. After an inauspicious start in which he slashed spending on missile defense by half (from $2 billion to $1 billion), and assailed its legitimacy by declaring the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty -- signed with the defunct Soviet Union and banning a significant missile defense system -- "a cornerstone of strategic stability," President Clinton committed himself to the program in the run-up to the 1996 election. It was a move calculated to counter the platform of Republicans in the House, who had made the missile defense system a key provision of their "Contract with America." In turn, Clinton pledged to develop a missile defense system by 2000 and deploy it by 2005.
As events were to prove, it was a hollow promise. In 1997, Bill Gertz reports in his book, Betrayal, "the so-called national missile defense program was underfunded by an astonishing 100 percent." By September of 2000, Clinton had abandoned any pretence of supporting a missile defense system, announcing that he was suspending its deployment. Likewise, Clinton's presumptive successor, Al Gore, elected to take his boss's noncommittal tack. Throughout his 2000 presidential campaign Gore declined to answer whether he would implement a missile defense program. "It depends on the tests. It depends on the findings of the research. It depends on a number of factors," Gore waffled.
President Bush's victory in 2000, and his candid support for the program, crystallized the Democrats' views on missile defense. If Bush was for it, they were against it. Hardly had Bush assumed office than Democrats actively began blocking all work on missile defense. Thus did the attacks of September 11 become but another excuse to rail against the program, with Democrats asserting that the greatest danger to American security came from crude terrorist attacks rather than high-tech missiles in the possession of rogue states--a claim that conveniently ignored both the Clinton administration's incompetent response to terrorism and the fact that terrorists were seeking missile technology and looked to rogue states like Iran to supply it.
The next front against missile defense was opened by Democrats on the Armed Services Committee. Leading the assault was Michigan Senator Carl Levin, a veteran opponent of missile defense, who headed a failed legislative coup in 2002 to cut off funding for crucial elements of the program. Even after the defeat, Levin's confrere on the Armed Services Committee, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, continued to press the case. "We're in this hugely expensive race to build something, but we don't know how much it'll cost in the end or what it'll do," Reed said in 2004.
There was more than a little hypocrisy in the complaint. Democrats, having consistently urged increased government spending and opposed research on missile defense, now postured as born-again fiscal conservatives, and insisted that missile defense could not work because it was insufficiently researched. Not to be outdone, the Kerry campaign even attempted to turn missile defense into an election year wedge issue. Imitating left-wing ranters in the blogosphere, Kerry's foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers, blamed the September 11 terrorist attacks in part on the fact that "Bush and his closest advisers were preoccupied with missile defense."
In their crusade against missile defense, Democrats are joined by an array of nuclear abolition groups. Some, like the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS) are relics of the nuclear-freeze movement that pushed for unconditional American surrender during the Cold War. Others, like the lobbying group Abolition 2000, are newer ventures devoted to the same purpose: the immediate elimination of nuclear weapons and missile defense programs, particularly by the United States. More than a conspiratorial aversion to the "military industrial complex," this mission, as the group in a 2002 pamphlet titled Beyond Missile Defense, a blueprint for a "comprehensive disarmament program for ballistic missiles," is of a piece with a "broader movement against economically unjust and ecologically unsustainable globalization." For these and other evils the United States is, of course, the principal source.
To say that these groups are more concerned about an American missile defense system than the ambitions of disgruntled dictators like Kim Jong Il is not to overstate the case. Victoria Samson of the Center for Defense Information (CDI), a reliable foe of missile defense, said precisely that in the aftermath of North Korea's missile test. As Samson saw it, the real danger was posed not by North Korea's missiles but by the "rising hysteria about their assumed capabilities [that] has done nothing except promote support for the U.S missile defense system."
With priorities such as these, its tempting to consign anti-nuclear groups to the margins of American political debate. Patronage from left-leaning philanthropies, however, has served to raise their profile and amplify what would otherwise have been the voice of a historically discredited fringe. For instance, the MacArthur Foundation, the eleventh-largest foundation in the U.S., has provided more than $300,000 to CDI. Another philanthropic heavyweight, the Ford Foundation, is a staunch backer of IDDS: Among the foundation's contributions is a $50,000 grant in 2000.
These funders make no secret of the agenda underlying their spending. The Steven and Michele Kirsch Foundation (SMFK), with assets of nearly $10 million, openly considers an American missile defense a greater danger to international peace than the Soviet Union: "Despite the Cold War being over for more than a decade and the Soviet Union no longer in existence, the nuclear legacy of that time period still remains," the foundation says. "Much more troubling, the U.S. is actively pursuing strategies, such as new nuclear weapons and a missile defense system, that seriously jeopardize the current international, treaty-based system." In keeping with those convictions, SMKF and another prominent left-wing foundation, the Ploughshares Fund (net assets: $25,480,954) launched a public policy initiative in November of 2002 called the Arms Control Advocacy Collaborative, or AC2. Foremost among its aims is "stopping the Bush Administration's planned deployment of a missile defense program."
Faced with a formidable opposition the Bush administration has, to its credit, stuck to its guns--and its missiles. The administration has spent nearly $43 billion over the past five years on missile defense systems and shows no signs of repeating its predecessor's policy volte-face. According to the Government Accountability Office, the administration intends to channel 14 percent of its entire research budget--some $58 billion--on missile defense over the next six years. (Those Democrats who previously carped about the dearth of research on missile defense have yet to praise the administration's foresight.)
President Bush has been not only a staunch supporter of the program but, somewhat uncharacteristically, an articulate spokesman for it. Explaining the need for a missile defense program, Bush put it with memorable bluntness: "We say to those tyrants who believe they can blackmail America and the free world: You fire; we're going to shoot it down." After years of neglect under the Clinton administration, President Bush has even made believers of the military. The Military Defense Agency, part of the Department of Defense, recently announced that the U.S. stands on "the threshold of having a ballistic missile defense system for our nation."
No reasonable observer would suggest that a missile defense system is a foolproof guarantee against enemy attack. But in a time when North Korea can conduct a missile test with impunity, Iran's rulers proclaim nuclear weapons a divine right, and jihadists seek for any means of wreaking havoc in the West, the far greater folly is to claim, as much of the Left does, that it is no defense at all. Just ask the Japanese.
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