Tuesday, May 15, 2007
- By Bob Beauprez
On the very day we learned of a great success with the missile defense program, there were also reports that the Democrats in Congress were trying to pull a $310 million rug out from under the program.
On April 27, the Associated Press and Fox News reported the first ever successful simultaneous intercept of two targets by a sea based test of the missile defense system off Hawaii. The reports further indicate that while this test was unique as the first dual target intercept, it was the eighth successful test in ten tests by the Missile Defense Agency and the U.S. Navy’s Aegis missile defense system. One might think this would be cause for some excitement in the hallowed halls of Congress.
However, the very same day other media reports told of Californian Ellen Tauscher's (Democrat Chairman of the Strategic Forces Sub-Committee) efforts to strip $310 million from the Missile Defense System's budget. The money is allocated to build an operations site in Europe cooperatively with the Polish and Czech governments. Tauscher and other Democrats are apparently concerned about some Europeans and don't want to trouble the French or Germans even if it's in the name of global defense.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently listed Iran -- again -- as the number one state sponsor of terror. The Tehran regime of Ahmajenidad is expected to have long range missile capability by 2015 at the latest, and since the international community does not seem to want or be capable of stopping them, a missile defense system in the region would seem to be a pretty rational idea.
Hopefully, Tauscher and her friends haven't forgotten that other nuisances like North Korea and Syria are very much out there still, and with the likes of Hugo Chavez to the south of us, prudence would seem to recall Reagan's "Peace through Strength" doctrine.
If any lesson from 9/11/01 was clear, it was that we created our own vulnerabilities by dismantling our intelligence community and systems, by ignoring the growing threat and aggression of Islamic Jihadists, and by failing to modernize our intelligence and defensive systems from the Cold War era.
Tauscher and many like her in Congress are fixated on the current fashionable Bush-bashing craze and too often suffer from a blame-America-first tendency. One day we may again suffer the consequences of inaction.