GINGRICH, CLINTON OFFER CLEAR CHOICE: DEFENDING AMERICA VERSUS LEAVING IT VULNERABLE TO MISSILE ATTACK

(Washington, DC): In the wake of last week’s terrorist
attack in Oklahoma City, President Clinton has gone to great
lengths to signal his determination to protect the American
people and their property against such devastation in the future.
This commitment is both in order and commendable.

Read His Lips?

At the same moment, however, Mr. Clinton’s
Administration is reaffirming its determination to deny the
American people and their cities protection against the sorts of
devastation that can be delivered by ballistic missiles —
devastation to lives and property that could make the horror
wrought in Oklahoma by a truck-full of high explosive seem
insignificant by comparison. Today’s Washington Times
reports that the Clinton Administration has developed with the
Russians draft language for the summit communique to be issued
when President Clinton visits Moscow next month. According to the
Times, this language will include an assertion that “the
1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty remains the cornerstone
of the strategic arms control relationship between Washington and
Moscow.”

In plain English, that means one thing: Under Bill
Clinton, the United States will continue to be absolutely
vulnerable to ballistic missile attack. After all, the ABM
Treaty effectively precludes this country from fielding robust
defenses; the proposed reaffirmation of the Treaty’s value
implicitly, if not explicitly, forecloses such defenses.

The Fine Print

The draft statement described by the Washington Times
makes a number of other troubling claims:

“Deployment of regional missile defenses [i.e.,
non-strategic or theater missile defenses not covered by the
ABM Treaty] must not lead to violations or circumventions of
the ABM Treaty.”

“Regional missile defenses can be deployed that do
not pose a ‘significant’ threat to strategic nuclear forces.
Testing to give such systems a capability against strategic
forces will not be undertaken.”

“Neither U.S. nor Russian forces will deploy
regional defenses against the other’s ballistic
missiles.”

On its face, such language would appear to give the Russians
new grounds for objecting to the deployment of theater missile
defenses — systems which enjoy virtually unanimous and
bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. In particular, the Kremlin
can be expected to seize upon the commitment not to
“circumvent” the ABM Treaty and not to deploy regional
defenses “against” their ballistic missile forces as
grounds for opposing U.S. cooperation with allies on joint
missile defense programs. They may even feel entitled to
challenge the introduction of American theater missile defenses
virtually anywhere on earth since Russian ballistic missiles can
be used to attack globally.

In short, if the Clinton Administration has its way in Moscow
(and beyond), the American people and their forces and
interests overseas will be without effective anti-missile
defenses. The message to the congressional leadership — which
has repeatedly expressed its formal opposition to this approach
in letters to President Clinton over the past seven months — and
to the public is clear: Your government is committed to defend
you only insofar as the next, deadly terrorist attack is
not delivered via ballistic missile. In that event, you are on
your own.

The Gingrich Dissent

Fortunately, the Speaker of the House of Representatives,
Newt Gingrich, has offered a stark alternative to the Clinton
policy on missile defenses. In candid remarks to a symposium
sponsored by the Pacific Research Institute and the Hoover
Institution in Stanford, California last Friday, Rep. Gingrich
commented on the absurdity of leaving the United States
vulnerable to missile attack — and described his strategy for
ending that vulnerability:

“Well, I think that the whole issue of how you defend
American cities from ballistic missiles and weapons of mass
destruction is one which we have mishandled, in part, on the
Right….[It] also illustrates, though, the entrenched nature
of the ‘Old Establishment’ in the city of Washington.

“First of all, you can get to a defense system
much cheaper than anybody wants to admit, and there was
to some extent a deliberate collusion to sustain the old
order by maximizing the cost of getting to the system. So I
think to some extent, the ‘Old Establishment’ has done
everything it could in very subtle bureaucratic ways to make
this a difficult issue.

“Second, the real argument should not be over the
defense mechanism. The real argument ought to be: One of
these mornings, Israel’s going to be in a crisis. Iran is
going to say, basically, they have ten nuclear weapons and
warheads, or ten weapons of mass destruction, and are we
truly prepared to risk Chicago to save Tel Aviv? And if we
don’t have a system that is relatively reliable, that allows
us to ignore a limited missile attack, the answer is going to
be ‘No, we’re not going to risk Chicago.’ And I think the
[moment] somebody makes this case clearly enough, you’ll see
the whole internal dynamic of the debate change overnight.

“I think, third, liberalism in America has now spent
from 1965 to the present, with the recent addition of Robert
McNamara, rushing around the planet explaining that the real
danger to humanity is somebody in the White House who decides
to fight a bad war. And therefore, there is an
extraordinary, grotesque desire to avoid how dangerous the
world is, or to come up with the most pathetic,
fig-leaf-kind of U.N. approach to wringing our hands during
the bloodshed. And I think that this goes to a core argument
over the nature of reality.

“And again, I think that we have not put the
moral burden on the Left of saying, you know, that they are
literally prepared to risk the annihilation of millions of
Americans rather than make a modest investment in blocking
dictatorships that have values that are extraordinarily
hostile to our civilization….

“The key political message is: ‘The world is
dangerous, we do have the potential to protect American
lives. Some people are willing to let you die or let you be
totally blackmailed. Which team do you want to be on?‘
Everything beyond that is overly complex. And I would
hope…we would have hearings this year on exactly what the
Pentagon and State Department have done to undermine and
weaken our use of the most advanced technologies, and exactly
how real the potential threat is…to Israel’s survival and
our ability to be effective in the world, if in fact, we
don’t have at least a thin-screen defense.”

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy welcomes Speaker Gingrich’s
timely engagement in this issue. The moment has clearly come for
the American people to be told the truth about their
vulnerability and to be given a choice as to whether they wish to
extend — and intensify — the danger posed by ballistic missile
attack.

The Center seconds his call for expanded hearings — perhaps
to include field hearings so as to allow the public beyond
the Beltway to participate. It urges, in addition, prompt
congressional action with a view to beginning to defend America
against missile attack at the earliest possible moment. In the
meantime, Congress must make clear before the upcoming Moscow
summit that it sees the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as more
likely to be a tombstone for innocent, undefended Americans than
the “cornerstone” for anything useful.