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MISSILE DEFENSE, HERE AT LAST
by Rod D. Martin, 30 March 2004
Last week -- March 23 -- marked the twenty-first anniversary of the
announcement of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to defend
America from a missile attack.
For everyone who sees missile defense as a moral and strategic imperative,
it's been a happy anniversary indeed. The reason? Thanks to President
Bush, this is the year we'll finally begin deploying it.
That's great news, but why the wait?
That's precisely what reasonable people were wondering when SDI was unveiled 21
years ago. When Reagan announced it, millions of Americans were stunned by the
mind-boggling revelation that our country had been facing a nuclear-armed Soviet
Union with no missile defense whatsoever.
With the Soviets still in business, Americans feared the consequences of an
attack. And indeed, after President Reagan's speech, an attack of sorts was
launched: not by Kremlin leaders, but by Beltway liberals like Ted Kennedy
and John Kerry. Before long, words like "reckless," "provocative," "war
mongering," and "Star Wars fantasies" blanketed the airwaves, crowding out
rational discourse and threatening to strangle SDI in its cradle.
Why was the Left so hysterically opposed to missile defense? Why were
normally free-spending, pie-in-the-sky liberals suddenly obsessing about
costs and whether the idea actually "worked" in the real world?
Simple. SDI was a full-frontal assault, not merely on the liberal
conception of "defense" but on the Left's view of America itself.
The keystone of liberal defense strategy was the Anti-Ballistic Missile
(ABM) Treaty. This treaty banned virtually all systems capable of defending
American and Soviet populations while embracing the theory of "mutually assured
destruction" or MAD. According to MAD, the best defense lay in a surreal
"balance of terror", in each country's certainty that an attack on the other
would result in its own civilian population being consumed in a sea of nuclear
fire.
This strategy was both utterly immoral and ridiculously naive. If holding
civilian populations hostage isn't evil, exactly what is? And indeed, the
Left forever prepared to "blame America first" -- rested its defense on
the foundational premise of "moral equivalence," that each side's problem
was lethal weaponry, not Communism's lethal intent. It ascribed the same
motives to each side when in fact their aims could not have differed more:
the USSR worked till its collapse to conquer and enslave the world, while
America sacrificed deeply to keep that same world free.
Yet for an entire generation the Left prevailed: not one air defense battery
and not one missile site was deployed to defend America.
Congressional Democrats prevented Reagan and Bush, Sr. from all but
research, and only a new Republican Congress saved the program from
President Clinton's clutches.
But those days are no more.
In December 2001, George W. Bush abrogated the ABM Treaty. By the Fourth of
July 2004, America's first missile interceptor will be in its Alaskan silo. By
New Year's Day 2005, we'll have a half-dozen interceptors in Alaska and four
more in California. In 2005 -- if and only if Bush is re-elected -- ten more
will be added in Alaska, ten will be added at a third site not yet determined,
and ten will be placed at sea, the beginning of a ship-based mobile defense this
column has vigorously advocated for years.
And this is just the beginning. But it is a beginning, the beginning of a
new era in which we live up to the Constitutional and moral duty to "provide
for the common defense."
The Left continues to fret aloud -- more from propaganda than from principle --
that "no defense is perfect", that a determined attack might overwhelm the
system, or that a suitcase nuke might be smuggled in, and that therefore any
missile defense should "obviously" be scrapped.
Yet this is "obviously" nonsense. Perhaps our enemies can still hurt us,
but making them work harder to do it is good; and without a defense, they
can kill any or all of us at will. Even after the rise of nuclear China,
India, North Korea and Pakistan, even after the revelation that the latter
two countries are actively spreading their weapons and their know-how to
anyone who can pay, Kerry and company would leave us defenseless, cowering as we
wait for the hammer to fall.
But we need not suffer a nuclear 9/11 or a last-ditch attack by a desperate
or defeated dictator to see that the Left is loony. History is a fine
enough teacher, of that and of many other things. Among those is surely
this: that they who cower before terrorists and dictators pay a price far
higher than those who stand strong.
In discharging Ronald Reagan's vision, George W. Bush has committed the
greatest patriotic act of our new century. For this, he deserves our
deepest praise.
Copyright: Rod D. Martin, 30 March 2004.
-- Rod D. Martin, Founder and Chairman of Vanguard PAC
<http://www.VanguardPAC.org>,
is an attorney and writer from
Little Rock, Arkansas. A former policy director to Arkansas Gov.
Mike Huckabee and Special Counsel to PayPal.com Founder Peter
Thiel, he is the Center for Cultural Leadership's Senior Fellow
in Public Policy and Political Affairs and a Vice President of
the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA).
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