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Daschle is competing for king-of-the-walk hyperbole. His opposition
to permitting Social Security participants to
deploy their
savings elsewhere than in government IOU's took the form of: "Would
Mr. and Mrs. America prefer to have had that 20 percent of their
savings in federal deposits in the last six months or in the NASDAQ?"
Waal, Senator, that's certainly setting up the choices in a way
that shuts up Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill in
one sweep, they who spoke about the fruits of individual allocations
of economic energy. He might as well have observed that the man
dropping from the mountain ledge, if asked in mid-air whether he'd
rather have stayed in place, would have answered conventionally.
Sen. Daschle
is asserting himself very vigorously in Washington these days, and
on Wednesday, in a dramatic rejection of President Bush's declaration
in favor of antimissile development, said that Mr. Bush had begun
"one of the most important and consequential debates we will
see in our lifetime." That's a pretty good launch — an epochal
debate by a young president to whom Mr. Daschle and his colleagues
condescended for so many months — for President Bush, and a crystallization
of the elements in that debate is badly needed. Is Mr. Bush investing
the entire defense establishment in the NASDAQ?
One demurral
doesn't deserve very much time, though it is the fault of some conservatives
that it was given any time at all. There is the school of thought
that says the ABM Treaty is no longer binding on the United States
for the very simple reason that it was negotiated with a national
entity now dead. The Soviet Union, with which the pact was signed
in 1972, does not exist. Some people argue that therefore there
is no surviving treaty. Treaties with the government of Louis XVI
were no longer inhibiting in Europe after Napoleon took over. But
the problem with that glib line of reasoning is that various treaties
with Moscow have, in fact, continued in place since 1991, and we
are on record as having recommended to President Yeltsin that it
should be so.
But that is
an ephemeral question because the treaty clearly gives to either
government the authority to cancel it on six months' notice. Mr.
Bush hasn't said he is going to do that, but his intentions are
very clear: He will attempt, for the sake of diplomatic camaraderie,
to weave about with Putin such alterations in the treaty as would
permit the experiments Mr. Bush and his team have in mind.
And here is
an important aspect of the approach Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld have
in mind. The antimissile system is not to be compared with landing
on the moon. That program was evaluated by a single criterion: Did
we land on the moon?
The administration
has in mind technological experimentations that give us mini-moon
landings along the way. Suppose, to use round figures, that the
paradigm — a perfect system — were given as "100," meaning
complete protection against incoming missiles. Well, as the mathematicians
would put it, that is an asymptotic curve. You can get nearer and
nearer to 100, but you are guaranteed only that. However you succeed
in extending the life span, you will never succeed in achieving
eternal life on earth.
The question
then becomes: Are there layers of improved security along the way?
If we reach, let us say, the level of 25 in five years, are we better
off? And if we have reached 25, will we have developed a technological
acuity that will hasten the day when security is progressively heightened?
If in five years we can, operating out of Alaska, reasonably hope
to give shelter to Japan and Hawaii from an odd missile or two from
North Korea, will we find ourselves on the way to a technology,
five years later, that fires effectively at the boost phase of inbound
missiles? Sen. Daschle and his colleagues will have to be convinced
that a quarter is better than none, and that a quarter invested
in the NASDAQ can bear fruit, if you let time and perspectives assert
themselves.
What are these?
Skeptics are saying that unless we have 100 percent protection we
have accomplished nothing, since a single atom bomb is strategically
unacceptable, and no coherent planning can be done if allowance
has to be made for the possibility that a single bomb would land
— on Washington, on Paris, on London, on Moscow. Mr. Bush's proposals
don't suggest hermetically sealed frontiers that would guard against
suitcase deliveries, whether of nuclear or chemical or biological
weapons. We run into our old friend the fallacy of division. It
is not true that because an airtight comprehensive weapons system
is unachievable, therefore individual weapons systems shouldn't
be encouraged.
There is only
one hypothetical decisive argument against going forward full steam.
It is this: Does Mr. Bush envision ongoing expenditures that rule
out concomitant expenditures on infrastructural defense demands?
We require a ton of money for naval and air and personnel needs.
Is that money jeopardized? We are very wealthy, but we aren't fighting
a war, and our tax load is already as heavy as if we were in fact
fighting a war. But the impulse to spend more — and tax more — is
awakened when the challenge to our resources seems real. Here Mr.
Bush has a job to do, extending beyond the diplomatic and educational
requirements of Mr. Daschle.
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