Abstract
Some time before the November election, President George W. Bush will appear in Alaska or California for the grand opening of his very own version of missile defense–a descendant of “SDI,” a.k.a. “Star Wars,” and its intermediate variants known as “BMD” and “NMD.” He will snip a ribbon around a small number of interceptor missiles newly declared operational and announce that he has fulfilled the pledge he made in his first campaign–to protect the country against rogue missiles.
The president will argue that he has been able to accomplish in four years what President Bill Clinton failed to do in eight. This campaign event will fit neatly into Bush's central reelection theme–that he has boldly acted to defend the United States against new threats in the global battle against terrorism.
On this occasion, though, unlike last year on the aircraft carrier when Bush announced that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, the president's handlers may avoid placing a banner behind him proclaiming “mission accomplished.”
Whether Bush's claim for the new system produces plaudits or catcalls depends first on how effectively the missile defense system's critics make their case. One senator, for instance, describes the system as a scarecrow that does not scare crows. It also depends on whether the media look beyond the claim in search of substance and on whether the president retains any credibility in the wake of the fiasco in Iraq.
In any case, Bush's grand announcement will be the culmination of a 20-year struggle that has raged since President Ronald Reagan announced in 1983 his dream of building a shield to make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
On May 1, 2001, shortly after entering office, Bush declared his intention to build a national missile defense while freeing the country of the “constraints” of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. By the end of 2002, he had formally proclaimed a new U.S. policy to deploy a national defense by the end of 2004–timed, not coincidentally, for just before the next election. The plan was to place as many as 10 interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska, or at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
A week before the president announced the deployment plan, a major national missile defense test failed. It was the third failure in eight highly scripted tests designed to produce success. A similar test that failed in July 2000 had helped persuade President Bill Clinton to decide against deployment.
But for two decades Republicans have virtually genuflected before the altar of missile defense. The eleventh Republican commandment appeared to be, “Thou shalt not criticize missile defense no matter how ridiculous it may appear or unnecessary it may be.”
Individual Democrats have been hamstrung, not by a similar commandment, but by the feeling that support for missile defense was a simple way to win a gold star in the “strong on defense” category. And the Democratic party has a number of ardent missile defense supporters–senators like Connecticut's Joseph Lieberman and Indiana's Evan Bayh. The party has tried to camouflage its split on the issue by avoiding it.
The Senate has not voted on missile defense since 2000, when Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin offered an amendment to require more testing. (It was rejected.) The House has not voted on deployment since passing a resolution in 2001 honoring the missile defense program and its contractors after a successful test. (They didn't bother to condemn the failures.)
After Bush was elected, there was one major confrontation in 2001 when he requested a one-year, $3 billion funding increase, from $5.3 billion to $8.3 billion. Led by then-Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, Senate Democrats won a committee majority to cut $1.3 billion from the request, with the funds transferred to combating terrorism and other programs. Then came September 11, 2001. Democrats backpedaled from the fight in the midst of a national crisis. Bush was given his choice of spending the $1.3 billion on either missile defense or the fight against terrorism–and surprise, he went with missile defense.
The atmosphere has begun to change this year. Democrats began speaking out against the program as the reality of deployment approached. And they had plenty of ammunition.
Key House Armed Services Democrat John Spratt of South Carolina was cited on January 9 by the Global Security Newswire: “You can put something out there and you can claim … it's adequate for the threat that we're facing, but it's a long way from what everybody thought was necessary for a minimal system.”
During a March 11 Armed Services Committee hearing, Levin pointed out that despite Pentagon promises to accelerate the testing program in the absence of the ABM Treaty, testing had actually slowed to a crawl. The last major intercept test occurred in December 2002–it was the failed test that immediately preceded the decision to deploy. Levin pointed out that “the system the administration plans to deploy in September will have completed no realistic tests. Zero.”
Levin added on the Senate floor on May 17: “If we want a missile defense that works rather than one that sits on the ground and soaks up money, we should not shy away from realistic testing.”
Missile defense proponents ran to the barricades at once. Arizona Republican John Kyl took to the floor to rebuke the critics' “ideological opposition to missile defense” and to criticize any suggestion of cuts in the current $10.2-billion-a-year program as attempts to “cripple effective deployment.”
Critics, however, have been bolstered by a series of authoritative pronouncements on the planned deployment. The General Accounting Office, in an April 2004 report, pointed out: “As a result of testing shortfalls and limited time available to test the [system] being fielded, system effectiveness will be largely unproven when the initial capability goes on alert at the end of September.”
When, on March 11, Rhode Island's Jack Reed, a minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, doubted that the system to be deployed this year would work against a real North Korean threat, the Pentagon's chief tester, Thomas Christie, agreed: “I would say that's true.”
Critics also point out that key parts of the system have yet to be fielded, including new radars and satellites to track incoming missiles and distinguish between warheads and decoys.
Yet even with rising dissent, key congressional skeptics pulled their punches. Levin, Reed, Spratt, and others decided it was too late to lock the barn door on this year's initial deployment. Instead, they determined to try to force realistic testing of later batches of interceptors.
Whatever they might have decided, it was unlikely that anything would be done this year. The House Rules Committee, the ultimate arbiter of what House members are permitted to vote on, refused to allow any amendment to be offered on missile defense during the mid-May House debate on the annual Defense Authorization bill. And in the Senate there weren't sufficient votes to block deployment.
“Oog is working on a unified field theory of rocks, sticks, and fire.”
