|
 iberal
opposition to missile defense perhaps reached its logical conclusion
in today's New York Times, in an op-ed piece that opposes
the very idea of defenses, for any purpose.
"No nation
has ever needed a weapon that did not terrify its enemies,"
writes novelist-historian Caleb Carr, "and we do not need this
one [missile defense] now."
This is a fascinating
theory, one that it's a shame Carr couldn't share with the Roman
soldiers who foolishly carried shields into battle; or the Germans
who ill-advisedly strung barbed-wire in front of their trenches
in World War I; or the American war planners who unaccountably have
placed such a emphasis on stealth technology for their planes.
Neither shields,
nor barbed-wire, nor stealth technology are particularly terrifying.
But all undeniably have military uses, which makes a hash of Carr's
"terror" test for deploying military technology.
More fundamentally,
Carr makes the same mistake as do many other missile-defense critics,
by assuming that deterrence works only one way — that the United
States will deter enemies with offensive weapons, but it would never
occur to an adversary to try to deter us. (To critics of missile
defense, rogue state leaders are apparently always completely rational,
just really, really dumb.)
Carr is right
that missile defense is not "terrifying." But ballistic
missiles are — hence their utility to enemies of the United States.
During the Cold War, the United States used the terrifying threat
of a nuclear response to deter the Soviet Union from exploiting
its overwhelming conventional superiority in Europe. Hostile powers
now hope to apply their nuclear capability in a similar way, to
check our overwhelming conventional superiority.
This is why
missile defense makes sense even on Carr's own terms. If an offensive
weapon is the more useful the more terrifying it is, anything that
reduces that terror potential must make a weapon less useful.
In other words,
if a North Korean ICBM is unlikely to make it through to the U.S.,
that ICBM will be much less of a factor in any crisis involving
the U.S. It will accordingly be harder for the North Koreans to
deter us from deploying our offensive forces against them.
This is how,
indirectly, missile defense has an offensive purpose (something
Carr resolutely denies). It keeps the U.S. free to act in the world:
to deploy its military without fear of provoking a nuclear attack
against which it has no defense.
Carr makes
much of the failure of the Maginot Line in World War II. The Germans
just walked around this formidable trench. In a similar way, Carr
argues, U.S. enemies will find another way to deliver a nuclear
device here if we build a missile defense.
But no one
is suggesting abandoning our extensive counter-terrorism efforts
against the liberal's favorite weapon, the "suitcase bomb."
We clearly need both a missile defense and an anti-terrorist capability.
To suggest that we can do without the former is as ill-advised as
arguing that we don't need the latter.
Finally, Carr
distorts the Pearl-Harbor analogy, by implying that missile-defense
supporters claim defensive technology could have made such an attack
impossible. We don't. The real point of the Pearl-Harbor analogy
is that enemies of United States don't always behave in the way
that we expect them to, and that, though it may seem "irrational"
for someone to attack us with a ballistic missile, that in no way
makes it impossible.
In sum, in
the post-Cold War strategic environment, missile defense may prove
as useful and necessary as barbed wire once was.
|
