Lessons of the War with Iraq (Part 1): Ban Mobile Missiles

(Washington, D.C.): The Center for
Security Policy has been enormously
gratified by the Bush Administration’s
decision to employ military force against
Iraq as the Center had been
recommending since 2 August 1990. In
particular, the Center applauds the
priority being given by the U.S. air
campaign to attacking Saddam Hussein’s
regime and its security apparatus and to
the neutralizing of Iraqi power
projection capabilities.

The Center believes that, even before
the war has run its full course however, certain
lessons can — and must — be
drawn from events to date. A
failure to learn these lessons could
seriously and unnecessarily compromise
U.S. security in the future. In the
interest of minimizing such risks, if not
avoiding them altogether, the Center
intends to identify significant issues
raised by the war with Iraq and to
recommend appropriate actions the U.S.
government should take in response.

The first such lesson can be found in the
on-going campaign to neutralize Iraq’s
Scud missile force. Virtually
the entire Western world is absorbed with
the urgency and difficulty involved in
the effort to destroy these short-range
mobile ballistic missiles.

Even as hundreds of American
and allied airmen are risking life and
limb to search for the Iraqi Scuds, U.S.
and Soviet negotiators are putting the
finishing touches on a Strategic Arms
Reduction (START) Treaty that will allow the
Soviet Union to retain a far more deadly
array of intercontinental-range
mobile ballistic missiles. The
irony of this fact seems to have escaped
the Bush Administration: At the very
moment that the United States and its
allies are being frustrated, indeed
traumatized, by uncertainties concerning how
many mobile missiles the enemy
of the moment has, the whereabouts
of such missiles and the ease with which
they can be concealed or
decoyed, the
U.S. government is prepared to sign an
accord that invites the USSR to exploit
such uncertainties to the detriment of
American security and sound arms control.

This absurd development is but the
latest indication of the disconnect
between U.S. military requirements in the
real world and those constructed
by arms control theorists. As a practical
matter, if mobile ICBMs are permitted
under START, only the Soviet
Union will have them; neither
the executive nor the legislative
branches in this country have any stomach
for the high costs and controversy
involved in trying to deploy the
rail-mobile MX and/or the road-mobile
Midgetman missile programs.

That said, the question of whether or
not the United States desires to field
its own mobile missiles is really beside
the point. After all, it would
make no difference to the strategic
problem the allies currently face in the
Persian Gulf if they also had deployed
substantial numbers of mobile short-range
missiles. To the contrary, the
United States and its partners would
still have to neutralize Iraq’s Scud
force — either through offensive action
or through effective defenses.

It is equally true that, for all the
talk among arms control specialists of
the “stabilizing”
effect of mobile ICBMs — if war ever
erupts between the United States and the
Soviet Union — the problem posed
by untold numbers of essentially
untargetable, nuclear-armed ballistic
missiles capable of striking the United
States rolling around the Soviet Union
will make the present challenge posed by
Iraqi Scuds seem like child’s play.
In fact, such a situation would be
nothing less than a strategic
nightmare for the U.S.

In the Center’s view, the Bush
Administration has no business assuming
additional risks in the form of defective
arms reduction accords against the
backdrop of Soviet cheating and
circumventions on both the INF
Treaty and the as-yet-unratified
Conventional Forces in Europe agreement.
What is more, such a step is all the
more ill-advised given the mounting
evidence that the present
purposes and future direction of the
Gorbachev regime are incompatible
with Western security interests. The
brutal crackdown now underway in the
Baltic states and the clear ascendancy of
hardline military, KGB and Communist
Party elements throughout the USSR is a
bellwether of still worse to come.

In light of this backdrop, however,
the need to learn the appropriate lessons
from the Iraqi Scud threat is all the
more important. Consequently, the Center
calls on President Bush to return to the
position previously taken by his
Administration and that of his
predecessor: mobile missiles are
inherently unverifiable and any agreement
that permits their deployment would be
flawed to the point of being unacceptable
to the United States.

At an absolute minimum, the
Bush Administration must afford the
people of the United States with no
less protection than that now being
provided to high-value pieces of Middle
Eastern real estate — namely, active
defenses against ballistic missiles.
The Center urges the President to
announce in his State of the Union
address on 29 January a firm
commitment to deployment of effective
strategic defenses and to assure
the American people that he will not
allow a START Treaty — or anything
else — to compel them to remain
vulnerable to the growing danger of
mobile and other ballistic missiles.