Heavy funding? Hardly. I think the number he announced is something like $1.2 billion over 5 years and not all of that was really new. Even ignoring that fact, how many days of tax cuts to the wealthy does that correspond to? I think I come up with something in the neighborhood of 3 days.
Ah…Could you tell me where in the ABM treaty it prevented theater defenses from being installed in any of these places other than the U.S. (and, the U.S. is a pretty large theater).
You are actually being too generous here. What Bush is set to deploy by the 2004 elections won’t be good against any missiles unless the North Koreans are kind enough to tell us when they will launch, what they are aiming for, what their warhead looks like (especially if there are any decoys … and, then they have to tell us what they look like too and make them look very different)… General Kadish, head of the missile defense program, has as much as admitted this himself. (One can quibble about whether or not they would also have to put a homing beacon into the missile.)
Right. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. And the exact same thing applies to many of these bad things that people are blaming on Bush. Especially when it comes to the economy. We had a tech bubble, driven by huge amounts of IT spending and speculation in the stock market. That bubble burst, through no fault of Bush’s. Then 9/11 happened, through no fault of Bush’s. Then Enron happened, through no fault of Bush’s. Those three hammer blows to the economy are responsible for ALL of the economic slowdown.
We know this because we can look at what Bush has done since entering office, and you can point to no policy decisions at all that would cause a short-term decline in the economy. There are no new heavy regulations, no new taxes, and his deficit spending so far has not caused interest rates to climb.
Furthermore, anyone who knows anything about the economy knows that the President’s ability to change anything in the short run is extremely limited. A HUGE stimulus by the government might be 100 billion dollars in a single year. Going into a 10 trillion dollar economy, that’s a 1% boost in spending. But it can’t even be that high, because the money is either borrowed, which effects interest rates negatively in the longer term, or it’s taxed, which hurts productivity immediately.
So let’s stop blaming Bush for the current poor economy. It’s far sillier than giving him credit for no more attacks, because at least in the latter case you can point to specific steps that the administration has taken to prevent it.
What the government chooses to spend its money on is separate from how much of my money they choose to make theirs. The fact is that Bush is spending more on hydrogen research than prior administrations (arguably a good thing) and taking less of my money (certainly a good thing). Of course, he’s doing it in part by deficit spending and I’m kind of a hawk about that, so let’s agree to put that, at least, in the no-good category.
Article I, Article X and Agreed Statement [G].
It’s not ready yet, and therefore it’s a bad idea? What a remarkable statement. The fact, the absolutely incontrovertible fact, is that the primary missile threat has changed from a massive, unstoppable attack from the Soviet Union to a small, possibly stoppable attack from someplace like North Korea. Whether an anti-missile system is the right way to go here is of course arguable. But the research restrictions in the ABM treaty made it impossible to find out. So withdrawing from ABM treaty = definitely good. Deploying an ABM system = jury still out.
Okay, it’s been a long time since I read the ABM treaty, but as I recall, under the treaty each signatory was allowed exactly one missile emplacement. And they were only allowed one radar system. The idea was that each country could defend their seat of government, but couldn’t deploy an ‘umbrella’ defense.
Israel, Turkey, and Japan are all deploying missile defenses around multiple population centers. That should be a violation of the ABM treaty. Japan is also using its Aegis system for detection, and as I recall the ABM treaty does not allow any missile defense or radar on water.
As for hydrogen - ‘heavy funding’ is a relative thing. Compared to the overall tax base, or even the cost of other major government programs, it is indeed a drop in the bucket. But compared to historical levels of funding for individual technology programs, it’s quite large.
Could you expand on exactly what “research restrictions” were actually preventing the sort of research that is necessary? I’d love to know. The only excuses that the Administration has come up with (and they are pretty lame at that) relate to things you want to do when you are going into deployment…which it ain’t ready for yet.
As for whether it makes sense to continue researching missile defense with the goal to deploy it down the road, well, that is at least a question worthy of debate. (It seems sort of pointless to me to go down roads where there are obvious and cheap countermeasures, for example.) But, that is basically irrelevant to the issue of withdrawing from the ABM treaty at this juncture.
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I didn’t even know they were party to the ABM treaty. Have they withdrawn from it too?
The U.S. and Russia were the only two signatories, as I recall. But the missile systems in all three countries are being deployed by the United States (well, Israel has its own Arrow system, but is also deploying U.S. Patriots).
Well, do you have a cite saying this would be a violation? I’m very skeptical … If this were the case, I would have thought that the Administration would have used this argument when explaining why they wanted out of the treaty. As it was, the only things they could come up with as wanting to do that violated the treaty were things that seemed like the only reason one would want to do them at this stage is if either you wanted to violate the treaty just for the point of it or if you wanted to go ahead and deploy a national missile defense for the 2004 elections well before it was even close to ready.
Now, in retrospect, you seem to want to point to all these things and say, “Look, this would have violated the treaty so it’s good we got out of it.” Well, you are going to have to do better than just claim this.
P.S.- Do you recall Russia lodging complaints when the U.S. deployed Patriots in Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War? I don’t.
The ABM treaty was meant to address issues of nuclear deterrence, i.e., to ensure that each side could be confident of their ability to maintain a deterrent that would prevent the other side from a first strike or whatever.
Plus, the ABM treaty was the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. I’m not an expert on weapons systems, but I find it hard to consider SCUDs a ballistic missile. Isn’t it generally acknowledged that the ABM treaty was written with ICBMs specificially in mind?
Might as well. The bulk of the money is simply being transferred from malaria-control aid to Africa. Want to estimate the net lives saved? His withdrawal of funding for birth-control and abortion education in developing countries has reduced availability of condoms there as well - no telling how much that has worsened AIDS.
NASA budget: He cut the X-33 program just when it was starting to come together. We’re stuck with shuttles for at least 10 more years. True commitment to anything else is not evident - has he said anything in public?
Iraq: “Twelve years of inaction”? Where have you been in that time, Sam? And your list of good things includes Republican control of Congress as if it’s objectively and inarguably a good thing, and pissing off the French as a goal in itself. Pitiful.
Why is it that many of you sight the removal of the Taliban as a good thing that bush did. One must remember that if the Taliban simply handed over Osama, they would still be in power.
The fall of the Taliban was a simple side affect of the war on terror. Plus, outside of the capital, the law of the land is still handed out by fundamentalist war lords whom govern along the same lines of the Taliban. Our overall effect on Afghanistan was similar to a getting Kabul a new mayor.
As for what else Bush has done that is good. If you look over the long term, he has set us up to grab an empirical hold on the third world. Raw resources will be plentiful in the coming years. If you just ignore the travesty against the people of those countries, you can almost smile when you fill up your tank.
Another thing that could be considered as good (long term) is the dissolving of personal rights. This will enable future government to be far more stable. It will also allow for much more unilateral action being that dissent at home will be nil, thus enabling for far more strict control over the empire.
I also count school vouchers a long term plus. Voucher will reinforce religion in the coming generations. Considering the suitability to influence from a religious source (i.e. government), this is a must of future stable governments.
On the short term, bush seems to be nothing more than an expensive embarrassment to this nation. On the other hand, over the long term, he is founding the roots of a very powerful and stable world empire.
**Some of these are good or bad depending on your point of view and political inclination, but let no one say that Bush hasn’t done a lot:
.Iraq is being dealt with after 12 years of inaction.**
Er, maybe the reason Saddam was so ensconced for 12 years was due to the misguided aid and comfort given him by Reagan and Papa Bush in the '80’s during Saddam’s little “tiff” with Iran?
Hardly. You did a good job attacking strawmen though.
Noone doubts that the ABM treaty prevents the deployment of a national missile defense system (outside of the one site constraint). The question is whether it restricts research on such a system. (Then there is the in-between question of to what extent it restricts development and testing in any way that matters at the moment if we are not rushing into a deployment mode which we ought not to be since we have nothing that works effectively to deploy.)
I mean, what the hell do you think we were doing all these years? You know, the research and development of the hit-to-kill system…All the tests of it. If your interpretation of the ABM treaty were correct, we’d have been violating it for years!
Here is an article by Philip Coyle, who is an advisor for Center for Defense Information but is former head of testing at the Pentagon under Clinton (through the end of Clinton’s term, I believe) and thus intimately familiar with where we are in the program explaining that “NMD development is not hostage to the ABM treaty”. And, here is a brief discussion from Union of Concerned Scientists, with links to a longer report, discussing the same thing. To quote from the UCS summary:
By the way, I should note that your original message that I was responding to said “research restrictions”…not development and testing restrictions…although as is pointed out here, while there are some restrictions in development and testing, those are not really an issue at the present time unless one wants to rush into deployment of a system that is not ready.
Bullshit. You, personally, doubted the ABM treaty prevented the deployment of a NMS for other N’s until my last post.
Son, it’s bad enough that you don’t read my cites – you might try reading your own. The thesis of his article is essentially that it isn’t (wasn’t, I guess) necessary to withdraw from or amend the ABM treaty yet – that the kinds of things which would abrogate it are down the road. Fine. So Bush decided to be honest with the Russians and say, “look, here’s where we’re going, and it doesn’t make any sense to pretend otherwise.” Bush also decided to test some systems earlier than Clinton had planned. But at any rate, it is (was) only a matter of time. The ABM treaty was going to go away. Bush withdrew, there were no repercussions – he timed it well. Who knows what might have happened if we had tried to withdraw when we’re almost ready to go to deployment?
I’m honestly sorry. If you don’t think that testing is part and parcel of research, there’s simply nothing I can do to help you.
And I missed it but where did you show that the ABM treaty prevented other nations from deploying NMS, let alone from deploying heater missile defense which is what Sam is talking about? As Sam notes, the U.S. and Russia are the signatories on the ABM treaty. I don’t see how it restricts what Israel can do and I don’t see how this restricts even what we do in regards to theater defenses. And, I’d be very interested to see if you could find any credible source that claimed otherwise.
Well, duh. I mean, doesn’t everyone know that the ABM treaty restricts deployment of anti-ballistic missile defenses. What do others think it does…restrict the deployment of french fries?!?
The point is that Bush has rushed to get out of the treaty as part of a plan to push to deploy and essentially make it inevitable that we will switch from a posture of using treaties to one of using missile defenses. And, here is the important point you seem to have missed, he has done this long before we have a working defense, in fact, before we have good evidence that we will ever have a working defense that cannot be easily defeated! Brilliant move for our national security…Freakin’ brilliant!
I didn’t realize that some people didn’t understand there is a distinction between research and development! As I have pointed out, we have already done lots of testing as “part and parcel of research” and none of that has been forbidden by the treaty.
