Post by POA on Mar 26, 2004 2:36:31 GMT -5
March 25, 2004
Elections Without Politics
The Military Budget Is Not an "Issue"
By JIMMER ENDRES
KERRY WINS SIX STATES, EDWARDS TO QUIT
WASHINGTON, MARCH 2, 2004 (Reuters)---John Kerry captured the Democratic nomination . . . piling up a string of coast-to-coast primary wins. . . . Bush called Kerry to congratulate him, and the two had "a nice conversation," Kerry said. "I said I hoped we had a great debate about the issues before the country."
Here's an issue: "missile defense." Where's the great debate? No major pronouncements from either candidate despite its being, literally, the biggest Pentagon boondoggle in history---yet another major issue Kerry could clobber Bush on all year, if he weren't complicit in the swindle.
Bush's strategy has been: "deploy anything," no matter what the cost. Perhaps the foremost cost is to national security. The insane equilibrium of Mutual Assured Destruction depends on a stalemate, and it was recognized early in the Cold War that any anti-missile system would be inherently destabilizing. In the Strangelovean logic of "nuclear exchange," a missile defense system lowers the danger, to a nuclear aggressor, of launching a first strike---since the retaliation will presumably be mitigated. Missile "defense" is thus rightfully considered by other nuclear powers to be an aggressive weapons system. It thus tempts adversaries to launch a first strike first. Use it or lose it.
An important indirect cost in Bush's recent budgets has been to shift funds away from effective nonproliferation programs, like the already under-funded and mismanaged Nunn-Lugar initiative, that would keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of nameless enemies in the first place. Overall, the monetary cost of the anti-missile folly, since Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative began in 1983, has exceeded $30 billion. Every dollar has been wasted.
[rest at link]
