Friedman’s MAD Scribblings
In the New York Times today, Thomas Friedman trots out the standard liberal line on missile defense.

May 15, 2001 5:00 p.m.

n the New York Times today, Thomas Friedman trots out — with a dollop of sarcasm — what has become the standard liberal line on missile defense.

In a nutshell, his piece goes like this: the Bush administration is arguing that rogue states are too nuts to be deterred from attacking the U.S. by the threat of a massive nuclear retaliation, but that they will be calculating enough not to attack us if there's a chance that a partially effective U.S. missile defense will knock down one of their ICBMs. So, what gives? Friedman urges the U.S. to abandon this jumbled business, and trust — as we have for 50 years — in the threat of catastrophic U.S. retaliation to protect America from attack.

There is so much wrong here it is difficult to know where to start. First, Friedman ignores the fact that there are two complementary reasons for a hostile state to pursue nuclear missiles: 1) to attack the U.S.; 2) to deter America's ability to act in the world merely by holding out the possibility of attacking the U.S. Friedman's position is that rogue states, whatever else you think of them, act rationally — so, how then does he explain the fact that so many of them are pursuing ICBMs? The answer is, obviously, that the missiles have important uses.

When it comes to attacking the U.S., a rogue state would not necessarily have to be "crazy," as Friedman puts it, to entertain the possibility. It would just have to have drastically different ways of making cost-benefit calculations than we do — which is not so outlandish to imagine (a blockbuster movie is going to be released on Memorial Day, dealing with one prominent instance from history when a foreign nation attacked the U.S., seemingly irrationally). Also, it's not quite as certain as Friedman makes it seem that the U.S. would be willing to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in retaliation for an attack, and as long as there is the barest hint of uncertainty about this, an attack on the U.S. would not necessarily be an act of suicidal madness.

Indeed, Friedman doesn't just take U.S. retaliation as a given, but U.S. preemption as well. As soon as a serious missile threat emerged, in Friedman's telling, we would just take the offending missiles out. One hopes so, but in the real world there are factors making such an option more difficult than Friedman portrays it. Remember the international condemnation that Israel endured when it took out an Iraqi reactor in the early '80s? Remember how President Clinton threatened to obliterate North Korea's nuclear weapons, but we ended up helping build North Korean nuclear reactors instead? Then, there's the problem of locating and destroying every nuclear-tipped ICBM in a given country — such an operation wouldn't be guaranteed 100% accuracy any more than a missile defense.

Finally, when it comes to deterrence, there is a moral question involved: Does Friedman really want the U.S. to have only one option should a country launch a missile at us — incinerating thousands and thousands of its civilians? If so, he should be ashamed of himself.

But missiles would have uses to a hostile power that wouldn't necessarily involve attacking the U.S. If Friedman is such a believer in deterrence, he should be willing to acknowledge that it works both ways. A hostile power armed with nuclear missiles is obviously totally different from one without nuclear missiles. Saddam Hussein would have been in a much better position to hold on to Kuwait had he been capable of threatening to destroy New York City. And, in turn, a nuked-up Saddam wouldn't be in such a strong position if the U.S. had a missile defense that would eliminate, or at least diminish, such a threat.

In Friedman's world, however, no rogue state should be investing in missiles, but instead buying Hondas and Fords — to deliver what has become the liberal's weapon of choice, the car-delivered nuclear bomb. But hostile nations are still stubbornly pursuing missiles because, among other reasons, it would be a little awkward in a crisis to say, "Let us keep Kuwait, or we will place a car on a cargo ship, offload it somewhere in remote Canada, then drive hundreds of miles, wait in hours of traffic, and pay a $3.50 toll, until it finally reaches mid-town Manhattan and destroys all of New York City!" An ICBM, obviously, offers a much more practical long-distance delivery device — hence, their popularity among Friedman's rational rogue states. (Something that missile-defense critics always forget to mention in their car-bomb scenarios is that the U.S. is already spending billions a year in protecting against this threat.)

Friedman makes much of the fact that a missile defense would not be 100% accurate. But no weapon system is. Does Friedman oppose the M-16 because it sometimes jams? Having some capability against ICBMs is better than having none. It will, among other things, change the calculations of hostile powers, and diminish the value of nuclear missiles because they'll no longer be such a sure-fire way to attack or threaten the U.S. If a missile defense system fails, deterrence and retaliation can always be a backstop. But, if Friedman's view prevails, the U.S. won't have any recourse if deterrence should ever fail to prevent a launch against the U.S. You don't have to be a rogue state dictator to know that that, well, just isn't rational.

EDITOR'S NOTE: In my piece last week about missile-defense critic Ted Postol, I should have mentioned that Bloomberg originally reported the story of the FBI's dismissal of Postol's allegations. Also, the Postol quote in my piece came from the Bloomberg report.