After marking up the defense authorization bill for the 2008 fiscal year last week, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D., Calif.) boasted of her “support for addressing real, near-term missile threats.” If only it were true. Tauscher, who chairs the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, had in fact just stripped $764 million from several key programs. These aren’t minor trimmings, but devastating eviscerations to missile-defense projects that are essential if the United States is to protect itself not only from the likes of Iran and North Korea, but also from the future beneficiaries of their proliferation.

The most important cut may be slashing $160 million from a $310 million budget to build missile-defense sites in Europe. Two ground-based sites in Alaska and California already give the United States a limited capability against North Korean missiles. To enhance this capability against the emerging Iranian long-range missile threat — protecting not only North America but also Europe — the Bush administration has begun talks with the Czech Republic and Poland to place ten interceptors and a radar system within their borders. The administration included funding to start building these sites in the request that Rep. Tauscher recently chopped.

Up to now, the main opposition to this initiative has come from Russia and anti-American Europeans. By joining them, the Pelosi Democrats have engaged in short-range thinking about long-range missiles. They claim that Iran is a problem for another day because it won’t acquire rockets that can reach Manhattan until 2015, according to intelligence estimates. But experience teaches that intelligence estimates can be wrong (see George Tenet, “slam dunk”). Last Thursday, John Rood, the assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, warned Congress that, with foreign assistance, Iran might obtain long-range-rocket technology in less than eight years. Simply put, if the government is going to err, it should err on the side of deploying defenses too early.

The biggest and probably the most brutal cut in the authorization bill is the $400 million sliced from the $517 million budget of the Airborne Laser (ABL). This would effectively eliminate one of the Pentagon’s most promising missile-defense programs, which seeks to mount a powerful laser aboard a Boeing 747. The 747 would then fly patrols over friendly or neutral territory (the Sea of Japan, for instance) and respond to missile launches in hostile countries (North Korea). One advantage of this approach is that, unlike ground-based interceptors, the ABL would attack enemy rockets during their boost phase, when they are easier targets because they’re slow and hot. And, as a laser, it would do so at the speed of light.

The ABL’s critics can point to past development problems. But what programs — even non-military research-and-development ones — proceed from start to finish without any setbacks? The ABL program has been showing steady progress. In two years, it will attempt to shoot down a boosting ballistic missile. A massive reduction in funding, however, will make sure it remains the stuff of sci-fi fantasy.

Missile defense is one of the signal accomplishments of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, beginning with the successful pullout from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and continuing through the deployment of a handful of ABMs in 2004. Neither of these events led to the arms race or breakdown in international relations that critics had predicted. Today, the United States is safer because it isn’t constrained by an outdated agreement and finally possesses a limited defense against missile attack.

Yet this is no time to take a break from building a robust national missile defense. Threats continue to emerge and mature, and it is far better to anticipate them well ahead of time than to react to them after it’s too late.