Changed Circumstances in Senate Require Bush to Move Now on Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.): Senator Jim Jeffords’ departure from the Republican caucus may have one therapeutic repercussion: The Bush Administration will have an incentive to act with dispatch on its top national security priority — defending the United States, its forces overseas and its allies against ballistic missile attack.

As the Center for Security Policy’s President, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., notes in a column published today in National Review Online, changes in the Senate leadership — notably the expected passing of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committee’s gavels to, respectively, Senators Joseph Biden and Carl Levin — make it imperative that President Bush remove his missile defense initiative from the death-of-a-thousand-cuts fate that awaits should it continue to be pursued in a business-as-usual fashion. The time has come for real presidential leadership. The way to do it is described below.

The defection of Sen. Jim Jeffords from the Republican party spells trouble for most of President Bush’s agenda. That is particularly true in one area: His commitment to defend the American people, their forces, and allies overseas against ballistic-missile attack.

The immediate problem is that Senators Jesse Helms and John Warner will, respectively, turn over the gavels of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees to their Democratic counterparts, Senators Joseph Biden and Carl Levin. That transfer of power means that Mr. Bush will no longer be able to count on two pivotal committees being led by legislators who share his sense of urgency about ending America’s present, absolute vulnerability to missile strikes. Now, these committees will fall into the hands of senators who have been the most indefatigable and effective opponents of previous efforts aimed at ending that vulnerability.

Left to their own devices, Messrs. Biden and Levin will do everything in their power to preserve the status quo. In Washington, few things are easier than resisting change. And what President Bush is proposing to do end the impediment to the deployment of effective missile defenses posed by the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed in 1972 with the Soviet Union, and initiate deployments impermissible under that accord will require him to overcome immense inertia.

Even before they became chairmen, both senators impeded the confirmation of some of President Bush’s appointees who will be responsible for missile defense and arms-control policy in the State and Defense Departments. Once they assume their chairmanships, it is a safe bet that they and their staffs will work assiduously to interfere with the Bush administration’s missile-defense policies and programs as well.

If the President is serious about deploying effective missile defenses, he will not be able to get there by accommodating, appeasing, or trying to compromise with the likes of Senators Biden and Levin. Adopting such an approach (as is so often the case with conventional opinion) is wrong. These legislators share an ideological commitment to the ABM Treaty and the arms-control house of cards built upon it. They may, for tactical reasons, choose to conceal their antipathy to anti-missile programs at variance with that accord, but they will never willingly agree to approve or otherwise legitimize such programs.

Instead, Mr. Bush’s only hope of realizing his goal of defending America against missile attack is to throw down the gauntlet. As William Kristol put it in an op-ed article in today’s Washington Post: “Bush will have no choice but to follow Reagan’s example. He will have to show that on a few key issues he can use the bully pulpit to strike fear into Democratic hearts. Any successful president needs to be not just liked but also feared.”

Here are the steps Mr. Bush should take at once to provide the needed leadership on missile defense and to minimize the chances that he will be thwarted at every turn by the likes of Messrs. Biden and Levin:

1. Mr. Bush should announce that the United States believes that the missile threat now justifies the immediate, emergency deployment of anti-missile capabilities. The emergency arises from missile developments in Iran, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and China (both vis-a-vis Taiwan and the United States). During recently completed consultations with many nations, his representatives made clear our view on this score and served notice that the president was determined to respond appropriately.

2. As a practical matter, an immediate deployment can only take place at the moment by using the Navy’s Aegis air-defense ships. While the existing Aegis system would have very limited ability to shoot down long-range ballistic missiles, the presence of an American missile defense of even uncertain effectiveness may help dissuade nations contemplating attacks and comfort coalition partners, other allies, and U.S. personnel sent into harm’s way who have reason to fear those attacks. A similar strategic benefit materialized when Patriot air defenses of unknown quality as anti-missile systems were dispatched to the Persian Gulf and Israel at the time of Operation Desert Shield.

3. What is more, six months from now given the appropriate presidential priority and a minimal increase in resources the Navy could introduce several low-cost improvements to the performance of the existing Aegis radar and missile systems so as to increase significantly their probability-of-kill under specified circumstances.

4. Accordingly, the president should immediately announce that, henceforth, Aegis ships equipped with existing Standard Missile II Block IV missiles will be tasked to provide whatever anti-missile protection they can to U.S. forces and allies and to the American people at home. The president has the authority to depart from the ABM Treaty which prohibits the United States from defending its territory against ballistic-missile attack without congressional assent. And, thanks to the negligible marginal costs associated with the first of these initiatives, he can act without having to seek additional funding from Congress.

5. Having set in train his defensive program, Mr. Bush can go to the American people and elicit their support for the next steps initially, the relatively low-cost upgrades to the Aegis system and then, as needed, other complementary and cost-effective anti-missile systems (the most attractive option being space-based defenses). In this fashion, the president has a chance to present Senators Biden and Levin with a fait accompli that will be much more difficult to oppose, let alone undo, than would be the sort of “business-as-usual” approach driven by budget timelines and processes. The latter are mortally susceptible to behind-the-scenes sabotaging at which veteran lawmakers like Joe Biden and Carl Levin are past masters.

As it happens, there will probably be no better time to launch Mr. Bush’s missile-defense initiative than in the midst of the hoopla over the summer’s newest blockbuster movie, Pearl Harbor. After all, the American people have rarely had more occasion to focus on the ineluctable fact that surprise attacks, like that on Oahu, are by definition surprises. With that reminder, President Bush should have to do little more than establish his determination not to leave our nation vulnerable to a future Pearl Harbor one that, if conducted by weapons of mass destruction and delivered via long-range ballistic missiles, could make the destruction on U.S. soil and loss of American lives inflicted by Japan in 1941 pale by comparison.