Investor's Business Daily, July 6th, 2007
Defense: Apart from prosecuting the global war on terror, creating a comprehensive missile defense shield is the Pentagon's most important job in the 21st century. Yet some in Congress are trying to kill it.
Why is Congress trying to defund the U.S. missile defense shield in Eastern Europe -- where it will protect not just our allies but the U.S. as well?
Hard to say. Today, some 19 countries have ballistic missile capabilities. At least eight of those have nuclear weapons -- and more are on the way. No doubt, most warrant watching.
In just a few years, Iran and North Korea -- both on the State Department's list of terrorist states -- will have nuclear-tipped missiles. And, as Friday's attempted assassination of Pakistan strongman Pervez Musharraf shows, that country is just a regime change away from joining Iran and North Korea as a rogue nuclear state.
These threats are real. Which is why Poland and the Czech Republic eagerly signed on to the idea of putting missile defense systems on their soil. At a starting cost of $40 million, it's a bargain.
As any defense expert will tell you, it's far easier and more effective to blow a missile out of the air when it's in its boost phase than when it's coming down. That's what this program would do.
Yet just last month, the Democratic-controlled House sought to cut the minuscule $40 million President Bush requested for 2008 to start erecting the Eastern European missile defense sites.
In the Senate, meanwhile, the Armed Forces Committee wants to kill the whole missile defense program, claiming its five-year price tag of $4 billion is too high. It may try to do so as early as this week.
"Their aim," says Baker Spring, a defense analyst with the Heritage Foundation, "is to force the U.S. to adopt a position that prohibits it from developing -- much less deploying -- missile defense interceptors in space under any circumstance and for all time."
Says a lot about the Senate Democrats' commitment to security -- which is nil. Not content to just cut and run from the war on terror, they now want to make us less safe from nukes, too.
Those who argue neither Iran nor North Korea have nukes are missing the key point: Once those rogue nations do have nuclear missiles -- and it's just a few years away, intelligence estimates say -- we'll be vulnerable to nuclear blackmail. Or worse, an attack.
It will take years for us to hone and put all the pieces of a missile defense in place. We need to start now, or be vulnerable then.
This isn't just about future threats, such as North Korea and Iran. It's also about China and Russia, which, like it or not, remain adversaries. Already armed to the teeth, they're building new nukes designed solely to incinerate the U.S. in the event of a war.
Russia's new Topol-M missile (range: 6,500 miles) has joined thousands of older missiles already aimed at the U.S. China, too, already targets the U.S. Its new CSS-X-10 missile will have a range of 8,500 miles -- enough to strike our West Coast.
This is why allies including Japan and Taiwan in Asia and a growing number of European nations want the U.S. to develop a missile defense. America's security and our continued role as leader of the free world depend on having a credible, workable missile shield in place -- against old threats and new.
If Congress kills it, as it's trying to do, it will be an unpardonable weakening of our ability to defend ourselves -- and yet another argument for why Democrats can't be trusted with national security.
