Security sellout
BY MONA CHAREN
mercurycenter.com
As you watch those ''spontaneous'' outbursts of anti-American fury
in China, see the rocks and lighted torches fly over the gates into our
embassy and consulates, and absorb the slogan ''Americans Must
Die'' -- you might want to reflect that Bill Clinton has consciously
permitted Beijing to have access to nearly all of our most sensitive
nuclear weapons technology and a lot more besides.
The nation the president once described as our ''strategic partner'' is
doing its level best to gin up the sort of hatred toward us that
Slobodan Milosevic so successfully incited among the Serbs toward
the Kosovars. China's state-controlled media have presented the
bombing of its embassy in Belgrade not as a mistake but as a war
crime, and they have helpfully provided bus transportation to
American sites for protesters.
Regarding that accident, one cannot avoid the conclusion that
Democrats have been incompetent at fighting wars for 25 years.
Lyndon Johnson's ''escalation'' kept us trapped in Vietnam; Jimmy
Carter's rescue mission of the Tehran hostages crashed and burned
in the desert; and Bill Clinton's now 47-day-old bombing campaign
in Yugoslavia has achieved none of its objectives but has resulted in
totally avoidable damage to our interests.
War is a fateful business. There has scarcely ever been a war whose
full ramifications were anticipated beforehand. Some things are
worth the risk, but we rely on our leaders not to commit war
thoughtlessly.
Russia, her political future quite uncertain and her arsenal still bristling
with thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles, is now more
hostile to the United States than at any time since 1989. The
paranoid elements in the Duma who have warned darkly about
NATO's eastward expansion can now argue with a bit more
credibility than before that NATO's claim to be a defensive alliance
is a lie.
Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria (also bombed accidentally) are now
implacably antagonistic. And China, well, how do you mistake an
embassy anyway?
Our Apache helicopters, which were supposed to intimidate Serb
military and police in Kosovo, have been grounded after two training
accidents. We are running out of cruise missiles. And now, having
committed the prestige of the U.S. armed forces to a war in which
our goals were unclear from the start, the fate of Kosovo will be
decided, it appears, by Slobodan Milosevic and Boris Yeltsin.
At the start of this administration, when one colossal screw-up
followed another, observers were invited to conclude that the
Clinton White House was either incompetent or venal. That choice,
we now see, was false. It is both. The war in Kosovo is evidence of
unforgivable incompetence. The loss of our most closely guarded
military secrets is evidence of venality.
Each day's New York Times brings fresh news of simply
jaw-dropping breaches of national security. The so-called ''legacy
codes'' for our nuclear missiles, which permit reverse engineering,
are now in the hands of the Chinese. So is the radar technology that
protects our submarines. When Clinton came into office, China
possessed about 20 unreliable ICBMs capable of hitting the United
States. As Newsweek described it: ''When the CIA showed the
(stolen) material to a team of top nuclear weapons experts, they
'practically fainted.' ... 'The Chinese penetration is total,' says an
official close to the investigation.''
How did the Clinton administration respond to this catastrophic loss
of key weapons technology? First, of course, by lying blatantly. Two
months ago, Bill Clinton said at a news conference that no breach of
security during his tenure had been brought to his attention -- a lie.
Despite evidence of potentially grievous security breaches, the
Clinton administration continued to press for cooperation with the
Chinese, dismissed evidence of spying, refused to prosecute or even
remove a key suspect, Wen Ho Lee, and helped a Democratic Party
donor obtain an export license for the sale of sensitive missile
technology to China. Clinton also personally appointed John Huang
to a sensitive Commerce Department post, where, Congress alleges,
he committed economic espionage.
The amount of money the Democratic Party and the Clinton
campaign received from the Chinese is still in dispute. Whatever it
was, it could never cover the costs of selling out America's national
security.
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