4.17.00
Way Out There

4.13.00
Feds Overreach on Elián

4.12.00
The Big Deuce for Noonan

4.11.00
House Invites Juan Miguel to the Hill

4.10.00
NRO Tops NY Times

4.10.00
Judis Strikes Again

4.07.00
Elián Fatigue

4.05.00
Most Treasured Right

3.30.00
Anti-Hillary Tome Hits Bestseller List

3.29.00
Elian and his Enemies

3.29.00
Reagan: Wrong Man, Right Time?

3.28.00
Forbes Endorses Bush

3.28.00
Enter Saint Jack

3.27.00
Oscar Wrap

3.24.00
How Many Bathrooms Have You?

3.23.00
The Law: Nuissance Suit

3.22.00
ED: Don't Do It

3.22.00
Gun Rites

n the second-to-last page of Way Out There In the Blue, a new history of the strategic-defense initiative, author Frances FitzGerald sheepishly admits that the Pentagon is "learning how to hit a bullet with a bullet in outer space." Preceding this are nearly 500 pages of text suggesting that it would never happen. At least she's honest enough to acknowledge that it's starting to: In several missile-defense tests over the last year, the military has shown it's possible to obliterate missiles flying above the atmosphere at supersonic speeds. An important test failed in January, but another high-stakes one is scheduled for this summer.

If it misses, the Left will declare it further evidence that Reagan's vision of a missile-defense system is an unworkable one — too costly, technologically out of reach, etc., etc. But these are not the real reason liberals loathe "Star Wars" (as they derisively call it) and its 21st-century stepchildren. They despise how it irritated the Kremlin, threatened arms-control negotiations, and weakened the nuclear-freeze movement. But that's not why they continue to attack SDI, either.

The Left hates Reagan, pure and simple. "He didn't appeal to Northeast city people like me," said FitzGerald in the Washington Post last month, as a way of explaining why she wrote a book about him. She and her allies just can't resist lambasting the thing that may yet become one of his most enduring legacies: a missile-defense system that protects Americans from ICBMs.

In the opening pages of Way Out There in the Blue, FitzGerald suggests that Reagan got the idea for SDI from his role in Murder in the Air, a 1940 Warner Brothers film in which, writes FitzGerald, "Reagan had played an American secret agent charged with protecting a newly invented superweapon, the 'Inertia Projector,' capable of paralyzing electrical currents and destroying all enemy planes in the air." He'd apparently been saving it up for 43 years.

She goes on to suggest, weirdly, that the desire for missile defense emanates from isolationist impulses. To put it succinctly, as Alan Brinkley does in his positive review of the FitzGerald book for the New York Times: "In the past, the dream of isolation had led to efforts to keep the United States unconnected to other nations, an idea clearly obsolete in the 1980s. Now a miraculous new technology promised to do what diplomacy could not." See, Reagan really was a narrow-minded provincial! Star Wars proves it!

What a classic case of trying to make the facts fit the theory, rather than the other way around. In reality, Reagan promised over and over to share anti-missile technology with other countries, including the Soviets, as a way of making nuclear war obsolete. That's hardly the act of someone determined to keep the American people "unconnected to other nations." (When Gorbachev told Reagan at their 1986 meeting in Reykjavik that he didn't believe the United States would freely export anti-missile know-how, Reagan, according to biographer Lou Cannon, "became intensely angry"--and abruptly walked out on Gorbachev a little bit later.)

But listening to Reagan's words is not something these critics like to do. FitzGerald maintains that, after billions spent, there is "still no capable interceptor on the horizon." (Brinkley piles on, too: "There is almost nothing to show for it," he says of missile-defense research costs.)

When Reagan delivered his famous SDI speech in 1983, he called it a "formidable technical task" that "may not be accomplished before the end of the century." He was right on both counts. It would be a shame if he were now proven wrong on a third: "current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable to begin this effort." It's time to see this effort through — and ignore spiteful naysayers like FitzGerald.

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