A Foolhardy ABM Deal
Someone should tell Condi Rice to go back to the drawing board.

November 2, 2001 4:50 p.m.

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Why the administration wants to go to such lengths to preserve the treaty is a mystery, since the president calls it "outdated," "antiquated," "useless," and "dangerous" — not much of an endorsement.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.