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Missile Defense?

Doesn’t this strike anyone as odd? Am I the only one that feels that this is a huge waste of time and resources? Bush Seeks Big Jump in Missile Defense Spending

The administration seeks to boost funding for its controversial missile defense program by 13 percent to $10.2 billion next year from $9 billion requested for fiscal 2004.

Think about this for a moment. Who posesses these types of missles? According to the “National Institute for Public Policy (some conservative think tank, i believe) Here is the list. They are arguing for a missile defense system, so I’m sure they’re going to make it look as scary as possible:

    Countries that supposedly have ICBMs:

  • Iraq (whoops, apparently not, cross them off)
  • Iran
  • North Korea
  • China
  • Russia

Now, China and Russia would never use them against us. Why? They’re both in the UN (permanent members of the UNSC), and they are both major trading partners.

Iraq obviously doesn’t have this capability (why did we go there again?), Iran and North Korea both would bring a world of hurt upon themselves if they launched them at us.

My point is this. Missile defense does nothing to stop terrorists. We face basically zero threat of someone launching a full-scale, state-sponsored attack on us.

What we do face is a lack quality intelligence processing, and a lack of following the immigration standards that are already in place. It is becoming clear now that the terrorists who hijacked the planes were here on expired visas, fake passports, etc. We need to be able to better process the information that we have available to us.

Combatting terrorism is not like playing the game Risk. It is not a matter of bettering your odds by increasing the size of your army. The way to combat terrorism is to promote good will towards your country. Promote development of undeveloped societies. Use our enormous economic powers for building up those less fortunate in the world.

Think of how this $10 billion dollars we’re spending on a missile defense system could be better used. What if we simply matched the aid we give to Israel, and give it to the government of Palestine. Take a true neutral stance in the Middle East, and bring the different sides to the table. And stay there. Create a Palestinian state. Truly work towards peace.

I won’t even get into all the different positive things we could spend $10 billion on here at home, but it’s clear that we could do better than to spend it on some foolish and false sense of security that will only anger our allies and embolden our enemies.

{ 1 } Comments

  1. John Dennett | 1/30/2004 at 7:47 pm | Permalink

    C’mon, do you really want me to get started on this?

    Look at who benefits from this kind of pie-in-the-sky Pentagon project: the infamous military-industrial complex. I realize that’s something of anachronism in this Age of the Multinational corporation, but we have any anachronistic administration in charge of the country. War is good for the economy. The world is us versus them. Supply-side economics works.

    Don’t even get me started on the Moon and Mars.