The best defense is a missile defense

By: Thomas Moore
The Washington Times, 20 July 1998

On July 15 a Congressional commission headed by former Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld
and composed of some of America’s best strategic analysts released its report on the ballistic
missile threat to the United States. Contrary to what the Clinton administration would have us
believe, the bipartisan Rumsfeld Commission found that a hostile power could deploy long-range
missiles capable of striking the United States with little or no warning. The proliferation of
missile components or entire systems might equip a rogue regime with strategic missiles before
the intelligence community could alert us in time to respond.

Of course, the best response to the development of such weapons is ballistic missile
defense,
but the Clinton administration has steadfastly opposed it. In 1995, to deflect criticism of its
anti-missile defense posture, the administration tasked the intelligence community to answer
skewed
questions about the missile threat. These questions were clearly designed to produce an
assessment favorable to the president’s policies. The result was a National Intelligence Estimate
(NIE) assessing the missile threat to the U.S. homeland as 15 years in the future — and
incidentally, omitting Hawaii and Alaska from consideration. Garbage in, garbage out, as they
say. It was this deeply flawed NIE that forced Congress to create the Rumsfeld Commission.

It should come as no surprise that the White House politicized U.S. intelligence in order
to
justify its neglect in defending the nation. In fact, President Clinton politicizes everything he
touches. In the words of William Kristol, he and his minions subordinate all the purposes and
instrumentalities of government to their selfish purposes. This is the real significance of the
parade of scandals emanating from the White House. Perhaps the American people are willing to
tolerate sexual misconduct in high office as long as the Dow Jones index continues to soar. But
they cannot afford to tolerate official misconduct that jeopardizes their safety and survival.

Why does the Clinton administration continue to leave Americans defenseless against the
world’s deadliest weapons? The failure to counter missiles armed with hyperlethal weapons is
incomprehensible, since we now have the technology to do the job, and at an affordable cost. But
deliberate vulnerability is the administration’s preferred policy. It is without precedent in human
history — that a great military and economic power, faced with a dire and growing threat, and
possessing the means to protect itself, intentionally chooses to remain vulnerable.

The primary obstacle to missile defense is the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty
with
the now defunct Soviet Union. This Cold War relic prohibited each treaty partner from deploying
a nationwide missile defense and placed other limits on testing and development, crippling the
U.S. missile defense program from the very beginning. The fall of the USSR should have
eliminated the ABM Treaty as an obstacle to missile defense. Yet arms control and foreign policy
elites, clinging to their old dogmas like pagan priests, have kept the U.S. ensnared in the ABM
treaty even though our treaty partner and the Cold War conditions that gave rise to it are long
gone.

The Heritage Foundation recently commissioned a study by the Washington law firm of
Hunton
& Williams which concludes that the ABM treaty legally terminated with the end of the
USSR
and the resulting absence of a bona fide treaty partner. This conclusion is based on the relevant
Constitutional law and international law, and has been vetted by the nation’s top legal scholars.

However, the Clinton administration is so wedded to the ABM treaty that it is attempting
to
solve the problem of no legally valid successor by creating a new ABM treaty. An agreement
signed last year in New York would convert the now defunct ABM treaty into a new, multi-lateral
agreement with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazahstan. The administration’s new ABM
agreement would impose new restrictions on the most promising theater missile defenses as well.

Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution and other laws require that this new ABM
treaty
come before the Senate for its advice and consent. But the Clinton administration is quietly
implementing it without the Senate’s approval. This is official misconduct writ large. If allowed to
get away with this breach of the Constitution and statute law, the White House would lock us into
vulnerability to ballistic missiles for the foreseeable future. As in the suborning of U.S.
intelligence, the White House shows a fundamental contempt for the legal and moral norms which
have protected our liberty and security for 200 years and made our system of self-government the
envy of the world.

Those who care about America’s security and the rule of law must work to make sure the
administration does not succeed in implementing the sweeping new restrictions of the New York
accords as a mere executive agreement. Defense Secretary William Cohen has already issued
guidance to the Pentagon for compliance with the New York “demarcation” agreements on
theater missile defenses, systems which were not even covered in the original ABM Treaty. The
body which implements the ABM Treaty, the Standing Consultative Commission (SCC), will
meet again in Geneva in September. Unless blocked by Congress, that meeting will approve a
periodic five-year renewal of the 1972 ABM Treaty and take further steps to harden the New
York ABM agreement into a fait accompli. Compounding the offense, the American delegation of
the SCC is led by a man who has never received Senate confirmation.

Congress must insist that the White House stop the illegal implementation of the New
York
ABM agreement and submit it for the Senate’s advice and consent in a timely fashion, using all the
tools at its disposal if necessary. For example, Congress should amend the relevant
appropriations bill to prohibit any funds for ABM treaty-related activities of the SCC until the
Senate has had the chance to approve the new ABM package. The Senate can take legislative
“hostages,” denying confirmation to administration appointees until the White House keeps its
promise to submit the new agreements.

The unprecedented refusal of a U.S. president to perform the most important functions of
his
office –provide for the common defense and uphold the law — confronts the American people
with a stark moral and political dilemma. If we are to have no say through our representatives in
Congress over policies that put our lives in jeopardy, can we claim any longer to be self-governing
citizens of a constitutional republic? The Rumsfeld Commission has sounded a clear warning
about the threat of ballistic missiles. But this warning tells us something else — we can no longer
cling to the illusion that the character of our leaders doesn’t count. If our leaders won’t fulfill their
most important moral and political responsibilities, then we the people must hold them
accountable. The ancient Greeks believed that a man’s character is his fate. The same may be said
of nations.

Thomas Moore is director of International Studies at The Heritage
Foundation.