In Prague on Sunday, Barack Obama boldly proclaimed that as long as there is a potential nuclear threat from Iran, the United States “will go forward with a missile defense that is cost-effective and proven.” Many observers saw that as a statement of toughness from a president determined to counter Tehran. It turns out it was a carefully-worded dodge from a president with little desire to build a strong American missile defense. Here is the story behind the story:
A few months before the January 2008 Iowa caucuses, a left-leaning group called Caucus4Priorities asked Obama and other Democratic presidential candidates to spell out their positions on defense issues. Caucus4Priorities was an offshoot of a bigger group, the Priorities Action Fund, created by Ben Cohen, the peace activist and co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The organization hoped to divert billions of dollars in spending from the Pentagon to education, health care, job training, world hunger, and other causes. One of its goals was to put an end to missile defense.
Candidate Obama made a video in response to Caucus4Priorities. “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems,” Obama said. “I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems…”
To Democrats on the left side of the spectrum, “unproven missile defense systems” had a specific meaning. “Our position would have been that, at least at the time, any kind of missile defense system was unproven,” Peggy Huppert, who was Iowa state director for Caucus4Priorities, told me. “We thought it should be discontinued, that it was not a fiscally responsible program — ineffective, not proven, too expensive.” Therefore, when Obama told Democrats that he would stop “unproven missile defense systems,” he was saying he would stop all missile defense systems.
When Obama won the party’s nomination for president, his platform promised he would “support missile defense, but ensure that it is developed in a way that is pragmatic and cost-effective, and, most importantly, does not divert resources from other national security priorities until we are positive the technology will protect the American people.” Worded the way it was, Obama’s pledge could have meant anything from robust, across-the-board support of missile defense to a complete abandonment of the program.
Now Obama is president and faces two problems for which missile defense is a possible solution. The first is North Korea’s launch of a ballistic missile which might someday carry a nuclear warhead. The second is Iran’s continuing effort to build a nuclear weapon. With that in the news, Obama pledged in the Czech Republic that, “as long as the threat from Iran persists,” the U.S. “will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven.”
In light of Obama’s history on the subject, what was he saying? Why would he go out of his way to tell an audience in the Czech Republic that a missile defense system must be cost effective? And since he said that he will go forward, but only with a system that is “cost-effective and proven,” was he saying that such a system exists today?
I posed the question to the White House, and a spokesman was as artful with words as his boss. “There is a provision in the defense authorization law for the last two years that establishes a process whereby such technology will be ‘proven’ technologically capable,” he said. What the White House left unsaid is that the missile defense system to be installed in Europe has not been established to be “proven.”
So what does the president’s statement mean? I asked Lawrence Korb, the former Reagan Defense Department official who is now a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress. Korb, who ran the Obama campaign’s military-policy team, recently wrote a report recommending the European missile-defense system be “halted until it has proven itself in realistic operational tests.” Korb told me he believed Obama said “basically the same thing” in Prague that Korb and his colleagues wrote in their report. “When it’s cost effective and proven, we’ll do it,” Korb said. “But it’s not ready yet.”
That’s not how the untrained ear would interpret Obama’s latest remarks. So here is the lesson. When the president says he will “go forward with a missile defense,” don’t assume that he will go forward with a missile defense. Don’t listen to what he said in Prague. Listen to what he said in Iowa.
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts can be read daily at ExaminerPolitics.com.
