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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (744924)	7/10/2006 2:06:23 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769669

Pyongyang, it turned out, had been cheating on the Agreed Framework since at least 1997, long before the Bush Administration came to town. The standoff has continued since, punctuated by periodic threats from Kim, and now with more missile threats.

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (744924)	7/21/2006 11:29:20 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769669

The Taepodong Democrats Still against missile defense, even in the age of Kim Jong Il. Friday, July 21, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT When President Bush announced the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty five years ago, Democrats howled. Pulling out of the treaty to roll out missile defense would, they predicted, lead to a new arms race, undermine American security and in any case was unnecessary. "This premise, that one day Kim Jong Il or someone will wake up one morning and say 'Aha, San Francisco!' is specious," Senator Joe Biden told AP in May 2001. Apparently no one bothered to translate "specious" into Korean. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has now defied world opinion by test-firing a Taepodong-2 missile capable of hitting San Francisco. The fact that the missile failed is small consolation, since we are also now seeing in Lebanon a further proliferation of missiles from Syria and Iran that can reach deep into Israel. Does anyone doubt that Iran, or some other adversary, will build an ICBM capable of hitting the U.S. as soon as it is able? All of which makes the U.S. political debate over missile defenses worth revisiting, not least because some Democrats are still trying to strangle the program. In the House, John Tierney of Massachusetts this year proposed cutting the Pentagon's missile-defense budget by more than half. His amendment was defeated on the House floor, but it won the support of more than half of his Democratic colleagues, including would-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Meanwhile in the Senate, Carl Levin (D., Mich.) offered in June to cut off funds for the ground-based interceptor program that Mr. Bush recently activated in Alaska in anticipation of the North Korean launch. Mr. Levin wants to stop new interceptors from being built, but Senate Republicans wouldn't bring his proposal up for a vote. Mr. Levin has been waging his own private war against missile defenses for a generation, to the point of outflanking Russian objections on the political left. No missile defense is perfect, but even our current rudimentary shield has proven to be strategically useful these past few weeks. The Navy had at least one ship-based Aegis missile-defense system deployed off the Korean coast, with a potential to shoot down a North Korean missile. The Aegis cruisers have successfully shot down missiles in seven of eight tests in recent years, and could become an important player in protecting allies and U.S. forces against regional missile threats. The U.S. is also dispatching PAC-3s, a more sophisticated version of the Patriot anti-missile system, to Japan. This kind of capability adds to the credibility of the U.S. deterrent, reassures allies and enhances American influence. Virtually none of this would exist had Democrats succeeded over the years in their many attempts to kill missile defenses. Going back to 1983, Senator Ted Kennedy dismissed Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative as a fanciful "Star Wars" program. Ten years later, with President Clinton in office, Democrats starved the program of funds. Republicans made funding defenses part of their Contract with America and spent most of the 1990s battling the Clinton Administration to keep the program alive. Democrats also made a fetish out of the ABM Treaty, even after the end of the Cold War. Al Gore campaigned to keep it in 2000, promising only to build defenses that would abide by its tight limitations. Senator Biden predicted that dropping out of the treaty to build missile defenses would turn the U.S. into "a kind of bully nation." And Senator John Kerry cautioned that "we must not set aside the logic of deterrence that has kept us safe for 40 years." Neither logic nor deterrence are the first words that come to mind when we think of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When Mr. Bush informed Vladimir Putin that the U.S. intended to exercise its legal right to withdraw from the ABM pact, the world didn't end. The Russians moved on to bigger issues, and much of the rest of the world decided that they'd like to join the missile-defense club. Six nations now participate with the United States in developing new missile-defense technology and nearly a dozen others use some of what's already been developed. The Pentagon now spends nearly $10 billion a year on missile defense and is developing several promising new technologies. These include sea-based defenses and low-orbit satellites that help track incoming missiles, as well as the Thaad program designed to knock out long-range missiles as they are heading to Earth. Thaad had a successful test over New Mexico last week. By investing in this capability, the U.S. may even deter the world's rogues from investing heavily in missile technology. Defense dollars are limited, even in terror regimes, and they won't invest their money in weapons that won't work. With the expanding North Korean and Iran missile threats, it'd be nice to think Democrats would acknowledge their mistakes. But we'd gladly forgo any apologies if liberal Democrats would finally admit that missile defenses are a necessary part of America's antiterror state arsenal. opinionjournal.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (744924)	10/26/2006 2:50:30 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769669

Secretary of State ElBaradei The U.N. arms inspector goes soft on Iran, but hard on Congress. Thursday, October 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, is supposed to be the Jack Webb of the nuclear nonproliferation scene, a "just the facts" man who reports his findings to his political superiors in the U.N. Security Council. Lately, however, he's been sounding more like the real life Jimmy Carter than the fictional TV detective. "I don't think sanctions work as a penalty," Mr. ElBaradei opined after meeting with Condoleezza Rice on Monday. The director general was talking about North Korea, of whose leaders he took the forgiving view that they are testing nuclear weapons because "they feel isolated, they feel they are not getting the security they need." As for Iran, "the jury is still out on whether they are developing a nuclear weapon." However, he was quite certain that "at the end of the day, we have to bite the bullet and talk to North Korea and Iran." No doubt Condi was grateful for this free public chiding. Leave aside for now the substance of Mr. ElBaradei's policy views; at stake here is the question of whether the IAEA can be trusted to be "continuously objective and impartial," words the director general has used elsewhere to describe his organization. That's also the line he took when he was lobbying in 2005 for an unprecedented third term against the opposition of then Undersecretary of State John Bolton, keeping the job after Ms. Rice and the White House acquiesced while asking Mr. ElBaradei to be tough on Iran. These assurances look disingenuous now that Mr. ElBaradei is offering confident judgments, well above his pay grade, about Kim Jong Il's motives--and cautious ones about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's. It's even harder to believe given the selective leaks and political hits the IAEA has recently practiced against the Bush Administration and its allies in Congress. Consider a recent imbroglio between Mr. ElBaradei and Pete Hoekstra, Chairman of the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In the last year, and initially with bipartisan agreement, Mr. Hoekstra's committee has published regular reports on threats to American security, including on al Qaeda, North Korea and Iran. These reports are generally based on reputable open sources and are intended for broad public distribution and debate. They also repeatedly acknowledge that "the United States . . . [lacks] critical information needed for analysts to make some key judgments." In other words, there's not much to get worked up about here. At least not until the IAEA decided to leak to the press an ostensibly private letter to Mr. Hoekstra detailing its objections to a report on Iran, which the agency variously labeled "outrageous," "dishonest," "erroneous" and "misleading." And what was so dreadful about the report, which had bipartisan blessing? Aside from huffing over two committee "errors"--one of them trivial, the other semantic--the IAEA took furious exception over the committee's statement that the IAEA had decided to remove Chris Charlier, its chief weapons' inspector for Iran, after Mr. Charlier said publicly that he thought the Iranians were intent on building a nuclear weapon. The IAEA insists that it was Iran, not the IAEA, that demanded Mr. Charlier's removal, and that Iran is within its legal rights to do so. That's true. But it is also true that Iran has repeatedly--and illegally--denied IAEA inspectors the multiple-entry visas they need to do their job. "Iran has consistently been in non-compliance with its safeguards agreement on this point," a former IAEA official recently told the Platts news agency. "And until now the IAEA has been unwilling to draw international attention to that fact." Our sources tell us that, in addition to Mr. Charlier, Iran denied entry to two other IAEA weapons inspectors in August alone. This is no small thing. Under Mr. ElBaradei's leadership the IAEA has presented itself as the ultimate arbiter on questions of nuclear proliferation, despite its failures to detect Iraq's nuclear-weapons programs in the 1980s and Libya's in the early part of this decade. Yet if the IAEA cannot get its personnel unimpeded into Iran--and especially if Iran can bar the toughest, most skeptical inspectors--the quality of the IAEA's information and the reliability of its judgments are bound to deteriorate. Had Mr. ElBaradei been doing his real job, he might have made a more strenuous effort at pointing out publicly Iran's failures to comply with its obligations, rather than offer grand pronouncements on diplomacy and making partisan intrusions into American politics by critiquing Congressional white papers and Administration policy. As it is, we have Mr. Hoekstra to thank for bringing to light yet another instance of Iran's bad faith, and of the U.N.'s unreliability. opinionjournal.com