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 omeone
once allegedly said about Vietnam that we needed to destroy a village
in order to save it. In a similar way, the Bush administration's
position on the ABM treaty now seems to be that we need to violate
it in order to save it.
Press reports
tell us that the administration is working on a deal with the Russians
that would allow us to go ahead with testing prohibited by the ABM
treaty. The problem is that there is no provision in the treaty
that allows its signatories to violate it by mutual consent.
The natural
question to ask is: If it is so important to violate the treaty
in the first place, why is it worth preserving? Or, alternatively:
If the treaty is so important to preserve, why do we want to violate
it?
Either question
sends you down Alice's rabbit hole into the surreal world of arms-control
blather.
Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld recently announced that the U.S. would suspend
a number of antimissile tests because they would potentially violate
the treaty. But Colin Powell said the other day, after meeting with
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, that "I have had some
discussions with Russian colleagues of mine who suggest we can probably
do more testing than we think under the treaty. . . . We are looking
at that."
In other words,
if the Russians say it's okay to violate the treaty, we can go right
ahead. If that's the way we're going to operate, why not just scrap
the treaty, and give the Russians a veto over any missile-defense
activity we undertake?
Why the administration
wants to go to such lengths to preserve the treaty is a mystery,
since the president calls it "outdated," "antiquated,"
"useless," and "dangerous" — not much of
an endorsement.
An administration
official told the Washington Post, "Testing will go
on, but there will be no announcement of a U.S. withdrawal from
the ABM treaty. That would be associated with a decision to deploy
a system which will come later."
Actually, Bush
has already said he wants to deploy a system, and is required to
do so by law as soon as the technology is feasible. So the ABM-treaty
deal will at best delay the inevitable, at worst make more difficult
a decision that is essential to American security.
It is just
commonsense political physics that the longer the ABM treaty stays
on the books, and the longer the Bush administration pays fealty
to it, the harder it will be eventually to withdraw from it.
It's an understandable
impulse to want to please the Russians and help them save face,
given the war in Afghanistan. But the way to do that is with the
reductions in the American offensive force that the administration
already considers desirable.
As it is, the
ABM-treaty scheme now being considered will ensure that the treaty
remains an irritant in U.S.-Russian relations, and possibly a permanent
obstacle to the U.S. defending itself from new emerging threats
around the world.
Someone should
tell Condi Rice to go back to the drawing board.
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