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MISSILE DEFENSE!  |
Perhaps Bush's missile
is only halfway up the silo
By PATRICK McFADDEN
of TheColumnists.com
Let’s say you’re in a friend’s car. Let’s call him George. George is driving you home one night, but he makes a series of wrong turns. You keep telling him you’re a little worried, but George insists he knows precisely what he’s doing at all times.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t, and you wind up in the wrong part of town. I mean, the really wrong part of town. This neighborhood is like a demilitarized zone. Gang members are roaming the streets like packs of stray dogs and casting ravenous glances at the car. You swear you hear gunshots in the not very great distance.
At this point, your friend, George, turns to you and says earnestly, “So, I’ve been thinking about flood insurance.”
“I’m sorry, did you just say flood insurance? And is that young man across the street walking towards us?”
Flood insurance may be a great idea. Heck, it may be something you are seriously considering in the future. But it’s not exactly your top priority at that moment in time, right? In fact, if your friend insists on harping on it, that’s going to concern you. You may come to the conclusion that he fails to grasp the gravity of your current situation, or that he’s simply not up to dealing with it.
Well, now you understand my reaction to President Bush once more striking up the band for, of all things, missile defense in a speech at a Boeing plant in Pennsylvania.
Missile defense?
Are you serious?
Maybe I’m hypersensitive because I live and work in the Washington, D.C. area. Our region is in the entirely unenviable position of being second only to New York (or even tied, on a good day) on al Qaeda’s “Things to Blow Up” list. So maybe that makes me a little touchy about terrorism.
But the president’s recent comments about the importance of missile defense have left me scratching my head even more than his comments usually do.
Just a week earlier Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times wrote two columns about the very real possibility of a terrorist group detonating a nuclear device in New York in the coming decade. Now, I realize that only liberals and the French read the New York Times, but--news flash--the most serious current threat to American security is apparently not an incoming missile.
Work through this with me, I beg you. Let’s make the charitable assumption that a legitimately dangerous nation like, say, North Korea, could jury-rig with duct tape and chicken wire an ICBM capable of accurately hitting North America with a nuclear warhead. Before Kim Jong Il lights that particular candle, don’t you think he might have the following internal monologue?
“Wait a sec. Those crafty Americans have satellites. If I fire a missile at them, they will know where it came from. They have their own nukes, which are bigger and more accurate than mine. Plus, they have a lot more of them. Also, they have actually used nuclear weapons in a war before. Twice, now that I think about it. If I do this, they will promptly turn my entire society into a smoldering pool of melted glass. Geez. Let’s climb down from Mt. Crazy and Stupid and think this thing through a little.”
Deterrence, after all, worked successfully to prevent a nuclear exchange with the Soviets (unless I missed something). Deterrence can work against other nation-states. If a point of attack is geographically fixed (e.g., a missile silo), we know precisely where to retaliate, and everyone on the planet knows we can deal death faster, on a broader scale, and over greater distance, than anyone else in history.
Deterrence arguably does not work against stateless terrorist organizations that launch attacks with no fixed geographic point of origin. You know, like the Islamic extremist terrorist cells who want to kill us. Remember them?
Their statelessness means they cannot be deterred, but it also means they do not have the resources to launch ICBMs. What they do have the resources and willingness to do is set off suicide bombs. And missile defense is useless against those.
To review, al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans with passenger planes. Experts contend that terrorists are trying to acquire a bomb to detonate on the ground in New York. The least likely mode of attack for a band of terrorists roving through the wilderness of Afghanistan or Pakistan is an enormously expensive and technically complex missile. Yet the President is taking time out of what I can only hope is a busy day reviewing ongoing threats to American lives to jump up and down about…missile defense.
Back to that car your friend
is driving around in Compton while he’s extolling the virtues
of flood insurance. Assume you somehow make it out of the neighborhood
alive that night. Do you really want to keep letting this guy
drive?
©2004 by Patrick McFadden. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master
Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506,
USA.
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