Missile defense: food for thought...

Here's an interesting editorial by National Review Online on what's going on with missile defense. Excerpt:

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.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: And here's more on the same topic, via the NY Times.

[missile defense] [Poland] [Czech Republic] [Europe] [Russians] [Iran] [North Korea]