Bush’s extravagant missile defense smells like a re-election gambit

When are conservatives not frugal with our tax dollars? When national defense is the topic.

President Bush’s directive to the Pentagon to have a missile defense system up within two years is extravagant and has very little to do with the enemy that attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld offered faint praise for Bush’s initiative. Rumsfeld said it was “better than nothing.” Donald Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists said that Bush’s missile defense plan is unproven and illusory.

The technology behind the defense system that was dubbed “Star Wars” in Ronald Reagan’s administration has consistently been regarded as questionable. Once al Quaeda wreaked havoc on New York City with a highly unconventional weapon, America’s defense establishment has repositioned itself. Our generals are not looking for conventionally delivered bombs; they are looking at domestically delivered weapons.

It is always amusing to watch fiscally conservative lawmakers spend lavishly and unskeptically on defense while subjecting much smaller domestic expenditures to withering questioning. Bush will likely get the $1.5 billion he wants from the Republican-controlled Congress, even while asking for tax cuts that will shrink federal revenues.

Bush and GOP lawmakers know that this spending, extravagant though it is, will be good for the 2004 election.

After an election that Bush won on war talk, it is difficult not to be cynical about the role that weapons and war play in his re-election strategy. Bush is not the first president to use the prospect of war as his re-election platform. But he will be one of the most expensive practitioners of that gambit.