MESSAGE TO A.I.P.A.C.: DICK ARMEY, RICHARD PERLE CALL FOR DEFENDING ISRAEL AND AMERICA AGAINST BALLISTIC MISSILE ATTACK

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday, the Clinton Administration
unveiled with much fanfare an initiative aimed at helping Israel
deal with what is, arguably, the most serious — and intensifying
— threat it faces: the menace of mass destruction by ballistic
missile-delivered chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear
weapons. This initiative took the form of a “statement of
intent” signed by Secretary of Defense William Perry and
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres (who was in town for meetings
with President Clinton and an appearance at the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC).

This statement is certainly welcome as far as it goes.
Unfortunately, it does not go very far. According to the
Associated Press, the statement commits the United States to
taking the following steps, in addition to ongoing cooperation on
the development of Israel’s Arrow anti-missile system:

• Sharing real-time early warning of ballistic
  missile attacks obtained by orbiting American
  satellites. This long-overdue step will put Israel in
  essentially the same position the United States is in
  currently — i.e., able to know a ballistic missile is
  incoming, but unable to stop it from arriving.
• Investing a further $50 million to accelerate the
  U.S.-Israeli development of the Nautilus laser.
  The Nautilus is a ground-based system intended to destroy
  incoming Katyusha rockets like those used recently by
  Hezbollah guerrillas to terrorize northern Israel. It
  will not be operational for some years and will not, as
  presently designed, be capable of intercepting ballistic
  missiles. And
• Establishing a high-level working group
  to explore ways in which the United States can continue
  to assist Israel in its attempts to build a missile
  defense system. The value of this working group in terms
  of actually defending Israel remains to be seen.

The modest nature of this statement of intent, combined with
its timing in the midst of election campaigns in Israel and the
United States, invites reasonable suspicion that — like so many
other Clinton defense initiatives — this one is
calculated more for political consumption than appreciable,
near-term security benefits to either country.

What About Defending America?

Still, the Clinton Administration’s newfound enthusiasm for
missile defenses for Israel raises an interesting question: If
the Israeli people deserve to be protected against missile attack
— as they surely do — why don’t the American people?

The question occurs because President Clinton remains
adamantly opposed to putting into place anti-missile systems for
the latter purpose. His stated reason: Israel faces a present
threat from missile attack while the United States does not. As
former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle
— a founding member of the Center for Security Policy’s Board of
Advisors — noted before the AIPAC conference this afternoon,
intelligence estimates upon which such conclusions are based
suffer from a serious “defect.” They assume that
nations interested in acquiring long-range ballistic missiles
will content themselves with developing such weapons
indigenously. In fact, they are more likely simply to purchase
these missiles on the world market, a development that Mr. Perle
warns “could happen at any moment.” As a result, the
United States could quickly find itself facing a threat of mass
annihilation from rogue nations not unlike that confronting
Israel today.

What is more, in announcing the new U.S.-Israeli missile
defense initiative, Secretary Perry pointed out that an
anti-missile defense system in Israel “should reduce any
incentive for any country to launch a missile because they would
see it would be ineffective.” href=”96-D41.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾ If such a desirable
outcome is achievable for Israel, why would U.S. missile defenses
not produce similar results? Why, in short, must the United
States rely instead on “our ability to retaliate with an
overwhelming nuclear response” to serve as a deterrent when
a) it is unclear whether such a posture will, indeed, deter some
potential adversaries like Iran and North Korea and b) if
deterrence fails, many thousands of Americans will have been
unnecessarily sacrificed?

A Real Leader

House Majority Leader Dick Armey used the
occasion of his keynote address to the AIPAC conference this
afternoon to emphasize just such parallels between Israel’s
requirement for missile defense and that of the American people.
Notably, Rep. Armey called for an “end [to] the
current policy of neglecting missile defense that leaves not just
Israel, but the United States in a vulnerable position.”
Highlights of his powerful address included the following
remarks:

“Those of us committed to the defense of
Israel understand that Israel’s security as well as our own
depends on the credibility of American power.
Communism did not collapse merely because our ideas were
superior to their wicked ones. Real peace still depends on
the robustness of American power and the willingness to use
it. To do anything less than provide for the full
defense of the United States when such defense is possible
and affordable is to fail in our responsibilities to our own
citizens. To do anything less is to fail in our
responsibility to our allies. A weak America will invite
aggression. A strong America will deter it.”

* * *

“Everyone knows that Israel is vulnerable to missile
attack. Most Americans do not realize that the United
States is also vulnerable. Indeed, most Americans assume that
we have the means to defend ourselves. This is a reasonable
assumption, but a wrong one. The dangerous
reality is we do not have the means to defend ourselves
against a missile attack, even though we should. The
dangerous reality is that unless we build an effective
missile defense, America will become even more vulnerable to
nuclear blackmail as nuclear weapons and the means to deliver
them proliferate.

“We must start building an effective missile defense
system now. Current U.S. missile defense policy is
based on the notion that mutual vulnerability to nuclear
destruction enhances the security of all nations, an
agreement that made little strategic or moral sense during
the Cold War, and even less sense now. To
forego building an effective missile defense means we are
counting on the restraint and goodwill of Iran, Syria, China,
Iraq and North Korea. I, for one, find this type of wishful
thinking dangerous, unnecessary, irresponsible and
dangerously irrepressible.”

Perle vs. Berger

In a panel discussion following Rep. Armey’s remarks, Richard
Perle squared off with Samuel Berger, President Clinton’s Deputy
National Security Advisor. In addition to pointing out the
erroneous assumptions on which the Administration’s pollyannish
missile threat assessments are based, Mr. Perle noted
that “what we are doing [in the field of missile defense] is
a tiny fraction of what we could and should be doing”
and called for a “much more intensive effort” to field
effective anti-missile systems. He also sharply criticized
Clinton efforts to negotiate changes to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty that would greatly reduce the capability of
systems like the Navy’s AEGIS-based wide-area missile
defense program.

In response, Sandy Berger made three misleading points:

1. Berger announced that the Administration was “moving
   forward at a rapid pace” on theater missile
   defenses, “pursuing vigorously” increased
   funding over what the Clinton team had inherited. In
   fact, the Administration has slowed-down and
   “dumbed-down” the most promising theater
   missile defense programs. If more money has been
   available, it has largely been thanks to the Congress’
   priorities, not those of the Administration. In fact, Mr.
   Clinton has even had the temerity to refuse to spend some
   of the funds specifically allocated by the legislative
   branch for this purpose.
2. Berger made it sound as though the “hundreds of
   millions” of dollars being spent on research and
   development of a National Missile Defense program was
   somehow leading to the deployment “in the next
   century” of an anti-missile system. The truth is
   that the Administration has no plans at the
   moment to deploy any national missile defense, ever.
   As for the hundreds of millions of dollars Berger
   referred to, they will probably wind up added to the
   tally that Mr. Clinton and his fellow anti-SDI partisans
   cynically claim has been spent on missile defense with
   nothing to show for it — ignoring the fact that such
   funds could have produced a deployed, effective missile
   defense if the will to do so had been present.
   And
3. Berger announced that the Administration opposed
   abrogation of the ABM Treaty, preferring to refine and
   improve it through “demarcation agreements.”
   This statement is disingenuous on two scores: First, the
   United States is not obliged to abrogate this
   Treaty. That accord has the sort of escape clause
   that President Clinton himself has promised to insert in
   the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty now under negotiation
   in Geneva. In the face of the threats to the
   United States’ “supreme interests” evident in
   — among other things — the Defense Department’s
   just-released, unclassified publication entitled Proliferation:
   Threat and Response, the Nation is fully entitled to
   exercise its right to withdraw from the ABM
   Treaty on six-months’ notice. Secondly, the effect of the
   amendments now under negotiation will clearly be to expand
   the restrictions of the ABM Treaty, not make it
   easier to deploy effective theater missile defenses —
   let alone to field the sorts of global theater/strategic
   anti-missile systems the United States and its people
   actually need.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy commends Majority Leader Armey
and Secretary Perle for their important contributions today to
educating the American people about the need for effective U.S.
missile defenses. The Center seconds Rep. Armey’s bottom line:

“I invite AIPAC to work with us to educate our fellow
Americans that we have the capability to develop an effective
missile defense if we have the vision and the will to do so.
It would be a complete surrender of our responsibility to
provide for the common defense to leave Americans or Israelis
defenseless against nuclear blackmail or devastation. Let
AIPAC and the Republican Congress work together so that
Americans and Israelis will suffer neither one.”

1. Secretary Perry neglected to mention an
equally likely corollary point: By making ballistic missiles seem
ineffectual, the deployment of anti-missile defenses may also
serve to dissuade nations from purchasing such missiles in the
first place — a real contribution to non-proliferation.