Sen. John Kerry has chosen his candidate for vice president. Immediately there arose questions whether his choice, Sen. John Edwards, has the requisite national security experience to be president. Some praised the Massachusetts Frenchman for having the courage to pick a fellow senator with so little experience and gravitas. But Mr. Edwards’ defense credentials are beside the point. We are not keeping our eye on the ball. Its not that the No. 2 guy doesn’t understand defense policy. It’s that the No. 1 guy doesn’t as well. Now, I know this flies in the face of the commonest assumptions of our nuanced and coiffed pundits, but let’s look at the record.
In my years working in the Senate, I was always struck how senators flounder during hearings when they have to depart from the canned speeches prepared by staff. This often occurs during question-and-answer sessions with witnesses. Often, the “real” politician is revealed. As I have highlighted previously, during one 1989 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Mr. Kerry asserted to then-Secretary of State designee James Baker that, as far as right-thinking people went, the issue of global warming was at least as important as the reduction of nuclear weapons.
In 1996 hearings on missile defenses, Mr. Kerry questions the entire premise behind missile defenses by asserting that no one could possibly be concerned because “there are no Russian missiles aimed at the United States.” Now it may be that Sen. Kerry, shortly before this important hearing, gleaned such special insights from myriad dinners at some foreign restaurants where he met with a number of “high” Russian “officials,” who told him the startling news that the Russians were no longer aiming their strategic rocket forces at any targets in the United States.
Even the committee witness from the Clinton administration was baffled by the claim, responding that such an assertion was not only dubious but also dangerous. Can you imagine our commander in chief conducting foreign affairs under the false assumption that the one country in the world capable of incinerating all of us is really not aiming any of its some thousands of warheads at us?
Mr. Kerry rapidly retreated from this claim only to stumble once again. He next asserted that there really was no reason to think that even if you wanted to build a missile defense for the United States, you would want to protect either Hawaii or Alaska. As he put it, “Why would anyone want to?” To be sure, the senator’s fortune was made in ketchup, but he has made much of his supposed knowledge of energy issues, such as global warming. A nice North Korean missile warhead landing in the proximity of the Trans Alaskan Pipeline would cause economic damage far in excess of that caused by September 11.
In fact, the Alaskan legislature was so concerned with this issue that they received a briefing from the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. The briefing noted that the North Koreans had a growing ballistic-missile capability and that an attack against the pipeline would cause some $23 billion in immediate damages and $46 billion over two years just in terms of lost oil supplies. Economic ripple effects would add hundreds of additional billions in damages. The Alaska legislature subsequently passed a resolution calling upon the U.S. government to build a missile defense protecting not only the continental 48 states but also Hawaii and Alaska. After all, the Constitution does call for providing “for the common defense.” And last time I looked, these two fine states were part of the United States.
This issue is not only of passing interest. The Clinton administration asserted there was no North Korean ballistic-missile threat to the United States, but forgot to tell Congress that the intelligence community deliberately left out Hawaii and Alaska in their analysis. Since Alaska and Hawaii are closer to North Korean rockets than the West Coast of the continental United States, the Clintonistas could claim — however dubiously — that whatever threat there was actually farther away than was the truth. It was later revealed that the National Intelligence Estimate had been cooking the books to come up with such a conclusion.
The North Korean ballistic-missile threat now is far more serious than it was in 1995-1996. The Republic of Korea government now claims Pyongyang recently has been testing both medium- and long-range rocket engines, although we had been assured by arms controllers in the Clinton administration that Kim Jong Il and his Communist hoods in North Korea had promised to place a moratorium on missile tests. This was not unlike the claim of the former Soviet Union when they promised not to aim any of their missiles at us.
President Bush is building a missile defense as a sound insurance policy to defend America. Arms control might work, but it might not. Mr. Kerry, on the other hand, vows to cut the funding for missile defense. He apparently believes the North Koreans and the Russians — there are no missiles aimed at us, and even if there are, they won’t attack us. Which view best reflects a sound defense policy suited for our commander in chief?
Peter Huessy is president of GeoStrategic Analysis.
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