Right-Wing Fear Machine

The younger and more internet-savvy members of our staff showed me a new video clip last week entitled "33 Minutes." It comes courtesy of the unabashed hawks at the right-wing Heritage Foundation. The title refers to the amount of time it would take an intercontinental ballistic missile or 'ICBM' to reach the United States. Apparently the clip is merely a preview of a longer movie set to be released in February 2009.

Watch it for yourself, but you might want to put the kids to bed first.

Kudos to Heritage for catching the typo they included in the YouTube version at 1:54 - "Balliatic"? - and correcting it on their website. Sadly they forgot to iron out other mistakes of a more substantive nature. I'll leave the mockery to others and stick to three main points.

First, Heritage commits the ultimate faux pas in national security analysis: It proposes a solution that doesn't achieve their primary objective. Robert Joseph, a committed arms racer and intellectual heir to John Bolton, says early on in the video that "my number one concern today is a terrorist with a nuclear weapon." A legitimate fear, to be sure, especially when you consider that the final report of the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism predicted that such an attack will "more likely than not" occur somewhere in the world by 2013.

The problem, of course, is that missile defense won't stop nuclear terrorism. How exactly will missile defense interceptors in Europe stop a terrorist with a small nuclear explosive device from entering the United States through Canada? Or prevent a shielded nuclear device, invisible to cargo detectors, from being smuggled into a U.S. port aboard a ship? Missile defense, obviously, is useless against these kinds of terrorist attacks.

Second, Heritage is guilty of fear-mongering without supplying the appropriate facts and context. That is the height of irresponsibility. The video begins by stating that over 20 countries have a ballistic missile capability. Yet, as arms control expert Joseph Cirincione pointed out at a congressional hearing on missile defense earlier this year, nearly all countries that possess ballistic missiles today are allies of the United States and possess only short-range missiles that threaten their neighbors, not the American homeland.

Lt. Gen. Henry Obering raises the specter of the United States only having 33 minutes to respond if Iran or North Korea launches an ICBM at us. Unfortunately, this frightening scenario becomes not quite so scary when you remember that neither country currently possesses a missile proven to be capable of hitting the continental United States. Though U.S. intelligence assessments have concluded that North Korea and Iran could develop such an ICBM several years in the future, deploying an unproved and unworkable missile defense system is not the way to change these states' behavior in the meantime. Currently deployed long-range missile defense systems remain an answer in search of a problem.

Third, Heritage praises missile defense for things it can't yet do. The reason for this boosterism is simple: missile defense is a theology, not a technology, for many conservatives. Gen. Obering claims that missile defense technology is so advanced that "we now are able to hit a spot on the bullet with a bullet." Later in the video, however, Kim Holmes confesses that "we do not have enough capability right now to do what we need to do." Well, which is it guys? Does the system work or doesn't it?

In the past nine years, the ground-based midcourse missile defense system has made eight successful intercepts out of thirteen tests. Because the system is still in the developmental phase, all of these tests have been highly scripted - including the "successful" test on December 5. They do not represent what might happen were a missile actually to be launched at the United States. That's why the Government Accountability Office concluded in February 2008 that tests completed to date "are developmental in nature and do not provide sufficient realism" to determine whether the system "is suitable and effective for battle." Our missile defense system still cannot neutralize a missile threat that employs even relatively simple decoys that could be developed by any country able to build complex, long-range, nuclear-tipped missiles.

Robert Joseph opens the video with a cheap shot at President-elect Barack Obama. "Hope is not a good foundation for a national security strategy," Joseph sneers. I'm sure Joseph would point to President Ronald Reagan, patron saint of the Heritage Foundation, as the model for a strong national leader.

What's funny is that in one of the most famous speeches of his administration, Reagan talked about something that offered "hope for our children in the 21st century" and "hope for the future" and "a vision of the future which offers hope." Know which speech it was?

It was Reagan's address to the nation introducing the Strategic Defense Initiative or 'Star Wars,' his flagship missile defense program.

Oops.

Diplomacy, deterrence, and containment have been and will continue to be far more effective than missile defense as protection against a ballistic missile threat to the United States. One should keep that in mind when the Heritage Foundation's movie accompanies a full court press for more money to field an unworkable missile defense system in 2009.

Comments

[realpolitic]

Reagan also wanted Gorbachev to agree to eliminating all nuclear missiles. I am sure the Heritage Foundation would hate that idea. Our primary fear is from a terrorist smuggling a nuclear weapon into the country. For Ithe Iranians or North Koreans to shoot a nuclear weapon at us would be suicide for them and they do not have the capability anyway. The Heritage Foundation just wants to sell a very expansive weapons system that was never a good idea to begin with. Such conservative groups want as militarized a society as possible.

[SimonNZ]

Great use of an Arabic sounding theme tune. I'm sure there are some very worried military contractors out there. If the ICBM missile shield projects get canceled they'll be hundreds of billions of dollars out of pocket. Best they stir up some patriotastic 'protecting the free world from grave danger' propaganda before it all goes south...........

[gro]

Given a small nuclear device, how many suicide bombers may volunteer to deliver it to any given target?
TOO many.
The fear is misplaced! And the money is wasted, of course. Unless you are heavily invested in 'missile defense'.

[realpolitic]

Correct! We are creating more terrorists than we can ever kill, as even Rumsfield said.

[2012isnear]

"I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world - in the field of advertising - and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours ... and we tend to disbelieve ours."
- Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S.

[Twinkie]

Great quote!

[deepfreezevideo]

The only important point to remember is that anyone who delivers a WMD can expect to get one in return.
That applies especially to ballistic missiles because it is impossible to disguise the launch location.
Thus, any group or nation which launches such a weapon can expect an answer shortly, and last I heard, our answers number in the thousands.
There's no such thing as 100 percent guaranteed security or 100 percent guaranteed defense, no matter how much the MIC would like you to believe there is.
There's also no such thing as politics when it comes to defense, no matter how much certain elements in the MIC would like you to believe there is.

[fedupwiththis]

Didn't I read last week that the currant crop of genius in the WH approved giving Nuclear technology to the UAE? That little pipsqueak country's biggest trading partner is IRAN! These are the people preaching how dangerous the world is and they give that technology to that nest of fanatics. If you ever wanted to point to baseless propaganda and fear mongering, this is it.

[Coinyer101]

i got to 2 1/2 minutes in and got tired of listening to their bs fear tactics. these people are 'millerites' ,just waiting for what they fear the worse. their 'rapture'. whatever, i wouldn't stand in the rain waitin' on it. they made it up.

[ThinkCreeps]

And the retaliatory response? Not very sensible strategy, even for a lone lunatic seeking valhalla.

[tomas0808]

Remember when the US was a strong country? When it could take any shot anyone could take, and shrug it off like a mosquito? When it didn't knee jerk react into exactly what our enemies wanted? Like Iraq? I miss that place

[vjoseph]

Yeah, same here

[RumiSouth]

Yeah. Whatever happened to the land of the free and the home of the... what was that word again?

[11907281]

"stop a terrorist with a small nuclear explosive device from entering the United States through Canada?" - Come on, you guys tried to pinned the 911 guys on us while we were taking in your citizens that you were going to let fall into the ocean. The millennium bomber was caught by a Canadian boarder agent. If anyone can point to any incident where Canada was using as a launch point to attack the USA, I'm all ears ... otherwise it's all, ironically, fear mongering.

[Berettasskeeter]

Sorry, about that Canadian border agent? It was a U.S. Customs Officer!
Semper fi

[Twinkie]

lol, sensitive much? It was just speculation, of course it's possible for someone to come over the Canadian border. What is there some kind of force field covering the whole area?

[AkiraBergman]

This is what happens when profit seekers infiltrate the government and the military. What they don't mention is that they want the private wealth to own the deterring capacity. This latest effort seems mostly about containing the evolving reform movement triggered by the financial collapse. They are scared. What they are doing in desperation is exposing themselves more to the forming public anger. They would better by keeping quiet. The Heritage Foundation is full of people Stanley Kubrick warned us about in his film Eyes Wide Shut.

[Fireslayer]

The Republican lie machine gets weaker with every shrill breath.

[000Jade000]

Whatever.

Our biggest national security threat is the criminals on Wall Street and in the Fed who are destroying us from the inside RIGHT NOW and killing our dollar in the process.

[arvay]

I just love the Arabic music at the opening, it's a gigantic cheap shot and reveals the vulgar fear-mongering that drives this.

A basic fact: any nation that launched a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile at the US would be wiped off the face of the earth. Extinction would follow. Who thinks that there's any government in the world so irrational? The US has thousands of nuclear weapons.

A domestic missile defense system would be rational. Not the provocative system proposed for eastern Europe, clearly aimed at Russia.

But the way out is , first of all, a rational Mideast policy, not the insanity dictated by Israel. Have fewer enemies, and there will be fewer threats.

[Mnemanth]

Be afraid, Joe Worker-Bee. Just stay afraid! It makes it so much easier to rationalize the billions going into the research and development of projects that really have no hope of sucess, let alone useful implementation.
Some one, some where, is making a lot of money in tax payer dollars- so long as those little tax payers stay afraid!