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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

kangdawei - 11:46pm Sep 28, 2001 EST (#9891 of 9895)

That's the Big Lie:

It's all the fault of the USA.

Forget the fact that Iraq slave-masters are selling UN food-gifts in order to buy palaces and biochem war factories.

It's all the fault of the USA that Iraqi children are hungry.

Forget the fact that the USA's last big military action was in support of Moslems against European aggressors.

It's all the fault of the USA.

Keep up the drumbeat of the Big Lie. Goebbels said it's a very effective public relations weapon.

kangdawei - 11:58pm Sep 28, 2001 EST (#9892 of 9895)

Civilization Envy

Someone once noted that a "gaffe" in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. Thanks to globalization, this is a worldwide phenomenon.

A Reuters story this morning begins, "Muslims around the world today demanded an apology from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the European Union recoiled with horror after the Italian asserted that Western Civilization was superior to Islam."

The Arab League demanded an apology or an explicit denial that the Italian could have even said such a thing. The European Union, led by Belgium (stop laughing), acted as if someone had used his fingers to eat caviar. "I can hardly believe Mr. Berlusconi made such remarks," gasped Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian prime minister.

Mr. Berlusconi told reporters in Berlin, "We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilization, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion."

"This respect certainly does not exist in Islamic countries," he asserted.

While critics have called his remarks "unacceptable," "barbaric," "silly," and — of course — "racist," I am at a loss to find a single untrue word in his remarks (meanwhile, how his comments can be "racist" is beyond me, since all "races" can be found within the Islamic world).

Now of course, this hasn't always been so. There was a time when the Muslim world was out in front in the race for human advancement, and there was an even longer period when the leader in that race was too close to call between the Islamic, European, and Chinese civilizations. But for right now, and for the foreseeable future, members and fans of Western Civilization have every right to wave the big foam "We're Number 1" finger as high as we want.

There's not a single category of enlightened governance in which the West broadly speaking isn't superior to the Islamic world — again, broadly speaking. Religious freedom, social mobility, and tolerance, the guarantee of rights and liberties in law, prosperity — you name it, and we beat the robes off them (though in family cohesion, they probably have the edge on us).

To disagree with this assessment would require us to throw out the very standards by which we judge our own society's shortcomings. For example, you can't say (as Jesse Jackson does all of the time) that the United States is racist or authoritarian or a police-state, and hold that Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, et al., aren't far worse, without being intellectually dishonest. You can't say that it's a crime that America "lets" so many of its people live in poverty, and then think that Saddam Hussein, with his dozens of palaces, is in some way a more enlightened leader. The same holds even for our "allies" Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Even in the historical arena, the argument is not so cut-and-dried as the anti-Westerners would have us believe. After all, the Arabs are just as culpable for their participation in the slave trade as the West. What makes the West unique was not our involvement in slavery, but our insistence upon ending the institution, both at home and abroad.

kangdawei - 05:27am Sep 29, 2001 EST (#9893 of 9895)

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on National Missile Defense Testing

MR. RUMSFELD: Senator, I would really like to avoid setting up hurdles on this subject. I think back -- I was reading the book "Eye in the Sky," about the Corona program and the first overhead satellite, and recalling that it failed something like 11, 12, or 13 times during the Eisenhower administration and the Kennedy administration. And they stuck with it, and it worked, and it ended up saving billions of dollars in -- because of the better knowledge we achieved.

In this case, if I could just elaborate for a moment, the principle of deterrence, it seems to me, goes to what's in the minds of people who might do you harm and how can you affect their behavior.

The problem with ballistic missiles, with weapons of mass destruction, even though they may be a low probability, as the chart that Senator Levin, I believe, mentioned suggests, the reality is, they work without being fired. They alter behavior.

If you think back to the Gulf War, if Saddam Hussein, a week before he invaded Kuwait, had demonstrated that he had a ballistic missile and a nuclear weapon, the task of trying to put together that coalition would have been impossible. There's no way you could have persuaded the European countries that they should put themselves at risk to a nuclear weapon. People's behavior changes if they see those capabilities out there.

I think we need missile defense because I think it devalues people having that capability, and it enables us to do a much better job with respect to our allies.

Now, finally, I don't think many weapons systems arrive full-blown. Senator Levin or somebody mentioned "phased" and "layered." Those are phrases that I think people, not improperly, use to suggest that things don't start and then suddenly they're perfect. What they do is they -- you get them out there, and they evolve over time, and they improve.

And so success -- you know, this isn't the old "Star Wars" idea of a shield that'll keep everything off of everyone in the world. It is something that in the beginning stages is designed to deal with handfuls of these things and persuade people that they're not going to be able to blackmail and intimidate the United States and its friends and allies.

kangdawei - 05:36am Sep 29, 2001 EST (#9894 of 9895)

Next-Generation Defense Shields

Cooper has also lobbied hard for missile interceptors based at sea, on existing US destroyers. They would employ the Aegis, the most advanced radar and battle coordination system in the world, and could fire missiles at closer but safer distances to targets.

"The technology is there; it's ready. It's simply an engineering task. It should be less expensive and should be buildable and deployable faster than a ground based system, because the Aegis cruisers are already deployed around the world."

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