The Heritage Foundation on YouTube

By Cernig

The Heritage Foundation has rolled out a series of short "Obama really agrees with us" spinnerettes on its YouTube channel. They're a cornucopia of opportunity to pour scorn upon these eight-year losers and advise Obama to run -fast -away from just about anything they say. (But the Malkinites are going to be very disappointed by some of what they have to say on immigration.)

Take, just as a for-instance, Jim Phillips' assertion that Obama must "keep the threat of force on the table because that will help to keep Iran honest." Because people afraid of annihilation tell the truth, rather than whatever they think will avert that doom...

The perfect case study has to be Pakistan and Richard Armitage's infamous "we will bomb you back to the Stone Age if you don't co-operate in the war on terror" threat. That worked so well, as the citizens of Afghanistan and Mumbai will attest.

Then there's Heritage's new fearmongering documentary, "33 minutes", designed to pressure Obama into keeping ballistic missile defense going. I wrote back in October that the Heritage plan is for nothing less than a ballistic defense, including space-based weapons, that enables a first strike capability - something rightwing hawks have been after since Reagan's day. Today, Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, Chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, writes at HuffPo:

Heritage commits the ultimate faux pas in national security analysis: It proposes a solution that doesn't achieve their primary objective. Robert Joseph, a committed arms racer and intellectual heir to John Bolton, says early on in the video that "my number one concern today is a terrorist with a nuclear weapon." A legitimate fear, to be sure, especially when you consider that the final report of the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism predicted that such an attack will "more likely than not" occur somewhere in the world by 2013.

The problem, of course, is that missile defense won't stop nuclear terrorism. How exactly will missile defense interceptors in Europe stop a terrorist with a small nuclear explosive device from entering the United States through Canada? Or prevent a shielded nuclear device, invisible to cargo detectors, from being smuggled into a U.S. port aboard a ship? Missile defense, obviously, is useless against these kinds of terrorist attacks.

The general also notes that the documentary is replete with the kind of exaggerations, misdirections and outright lies that we've come to expect from the neocon House of Heritage. He concludes "missile defense is a theology, not a technology, for many conservatives". The holy grail of neocon theology is being able to nuke without fear of being nuked back. Then, nothing could stop the new American Century! (Oh, and we wouldn't have to worry about nation building or reconstruction afterwards.)

Comments

[Peter G.]

I heartily agree with you that missile defense systems as proposed are laughable, expensive and don't address any credible threat. I do have a question however. You have suggested a couple of times that such a system would somehow become a first strike weapon. Physically this is impossible as these type of missiles are completely unsuited to the task. I thought perhaps you meant that the existence of a missile based defense system would upset the balance of power (Re:MAD). Perhaps you could clarify.

[Steve Hynd]

I should instead have written that BMD enables first strike thinking by weakening any possible counter-strike. "We can nuke you but you can't effectively nuke us back - we'd survive, you wouldn't."

Regards, C

[Peter G.]

That makes sense and I rather thought you meant something along those lines.