One of the eternal mysteries of American domestic and foreign policy has to do with the missile defense system, which we learned recently will be deployed in Poland. The system has never worked, and indeed, it seems almost impossible for it to ever work. It is sold as a defensive system, which will shoot down incoming missiles in the event of attack. It has never really worked even in rigged tests, and there are a number of ways to render it impotent, among which is the liberal use of decoy missiles. The cost of a decoy is a tiny fraction of the cost of a full fledged SDI missile, so an adversary could effectively bankrupt us just by building decoys. There are other technical problems, but the decoy issue alone seems to render the system impracticable for its alleged use.
So why do we continue to build it, and why is Russia so upset that we are doing so?
A friend of mine sent me an email with some materials that may provide part of the answer. The first is an article by George Monbiot in Z magazine. I have a link, but it is of no use unless you are a sustaining contributor at the site. Monbiot’s conclusions are relatively predictable:
So why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail? I’ll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. The programme persists because it doesn’t work.
US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats to deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to toe. But under Bush the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities. Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries which give millions in political donations with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding which won’t run out however much you eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the system will never work.
To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the threats from nations which have no means of nuking it and ignore the likely responses of those which do. Russia is not without its own corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets. Poor old Poland, like the Czech Republic and the UK, gets strong-armed into becoming America’s ground bait.
If we seek to understand US foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government’s interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at key stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.
That answers the question of why we do it, but it doesn’t answer the question of why the Russians are so upset at this system, which appears to be so easy to game. My friend posted a comment to Monbiot’s article, raising a point I had not heard before, but which makes a lot of sense:
More specifically with respect to missile “defense,” its role in the drive for global hegemony is that missile “defense” is a misnomer and that SDI, or “Star Wars,” is in fact a first-strike weapon. In view of the recent mad Bush agreements to install these weapons in Eastern Europe, this perspective needs to be more widely understood. Sources include Edward S. Herman, “Neither Popular Government Nor Popular Information,” Z Magazine, March 2008, p. 29; and Noam Chomsky, “‘GoodNews,’ Iraq and Beyond, Part I,” Z Magazine, April 2008, p. 25.
Herman says SDI “could be used in a first strike against Russia with little time elapsing for Russian defense, or it would be useful in the case of a U.S. first strike against Russia as a means of dealing with any Russian response.” Mad “planners” who know the system could never handle large numbers of missiles could still deem it useful in dealing with what the Russians would have left to fire after suffering a first-strike from the US. Chomsky says “the programs are designed in such a way that Russian planners would have to regard [them] as a threat to the Russian deterrent, hence calling for more advanced and lethal military capacity to neutralize them (see George Lewis and Theodore Postol, ‘European Missile Defense: The Technological Basis of Russian Concerns,’ Arms Control Today, October 2007).” See here for more on Professor Chomsky’s views. As Chomsky points out, “The installation of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe is, virtually, a declaration of war.” At any rate the plan to place SDI essentially on Russia’s doorstep is clearly reckless to the point of insanity, but what else is new? And rational people must oppose its deployment in Eastern Europe, a step which also reduces the decision-making time for Russian response to a perceived threat and thus once again brings us closer to unintended nuclear war. That opposition should expose SDI as not only the perfect pork barrel but as setting the stage for “accidental” nuclear war or even a nuclear first-strike.
In other words, missile “defense” undermines the Mutual Assured Destruction logic that has prevented nuclear war by allowing one side to believe that it could, in fact, avoid destruction, in the event that it initiated war. It is not the defense that the Russians fear, but the freedom the system would give us to go on offense. Rice/Bush’s argument that the installation in Poland is designed to ward off an attack from Iran or North Korea is so laughable that even the American Press doesn’t appear to take it seriously. The Russians, of course, see the system for what it is: an attempt by this country to maintain global hegemony (I don’t like that word-it makes me thing of 60s SDSers- but no useful synonym comes to mind). They, unlike us, have apparently had enough of bankrupting themselves in arms races, for viewed in a “first strike” light, the only response to such a system is a similar system, with all the attendant cost.
So, we have two answers to why we continue to pour money into a missile system that will never work as advertised, but may work well enough to incite another expensive arms race. That doesn’t tell us why Bush/Cheney decided to announce the deal with Poland now. Perhaps it’s the Georgia thing, but there’s always the chance that they noticed that Eastern Europe was a part of the world that they hadn’t yet completely screwed up, and they figured that they could still accomplish something in that line before January.
