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June 4, 2004
Yesterday John Kerry said that
Yesterday John Kerry said that he would not deploy a missile defense system if elected president:
"Yes, we must invest in missile defense. But not at the cost of other pressing priorities," the Democratic presidential candidate said. "We cannot afford to spend billions to deploy an unproven missile-defense system. Not only is it not ready, but it's the wrong priority for a war on terror where the enemy strikes with a bomb in the back of a truck, or a vial of anthrax in a briefcase."
I remember during the Gulf War, watching the Scuds rain down on our troops in Saudi Arabia and on the Israelis, and saying to myself "This proves how dangerous these missiles are, surely now it will be clear to everyone that we need a defense against them." How wrong I was.
During that war Saddam only had primitive Scuds to fire at us. Today our enemies have much more advanced systems that are both more accurate and have a longer range. During that war I thought "If Saddam can wreck such havoc with such a primitive missile as the Scud, imagine what a more advanced one could do." Apparently those who oppose a defense have done no imagining.
It will be objected that the Patriot performed poorly during the Gulf War and that we can therefore not count on any defense during a new conflict. This of course misses the point. What was important during the Gulf War was that people, in particular the Israelis, believed that Patriot was working. Israel, it will be recalled, was on the verge of attacking Iraq after the first missile strikes on their country. Only the deployment of the Patriot system stopped them. If Israel had become involved in the war the coalition might well have fallen apart. It would certainly have become severely strained.
I am not arguing that perception is reality. But we must keep perceptions in mind. Those who object to missile defense on the grounds that "it won't work" are mainly westerners. The Soviets seemed to think it would work. The Israelis thought it worked. And as long as our enemies think that it might work we can deter them. We remove the certainty that their missiles will strike their intended targets.
Kerry is part of the "research forever, deploy never" crowd. To them, missile defense will never, indeed must never, be ready. For there is no testing regime that will satisfy them, none that will meet their standards of perfection.
It will also be objected that countries such as North Korea will not attack the U.S. because we can hit them back a hundred times harder and "end their country" as President Clinton once put it. This assumes that all actors will behave rationally. More to the point, it assumes that all countries will behave according to our definition of rationality. This assumption is unwarrented. History, anyone?
And of course there is the objection that there are other, more important threats. Well, yes, perhaps there are. And we must work to counter them. But given that the federal budget is almost 2 trillion per year now, with the vast majority being non defense spending, the idea that we cannot both fund defense against "a bomb in the back of a truck" as well as missiles is ludicrous. We are in a war but are not on a war footing. Non-defense spending continues to grow as before. God forbid that non-defense programs should experience significant funding slowdowns, much less cuts, in a time of war. And unfortunately, George Bush has proven that he's not going to be much help in getting overall spending under control. He must hold the course on missile defense.
Posted by Tom at June 4, 2004 7:53 AM
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