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Posted on 10/05/2001 6:26:07 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen

September 11 was the day that terrorists attacked America. September 12 was the day that the New York Times and others began using the attack to argue against building a missile-defense system. Their case had a superficial appeal: This horrific attack had not required a ballistic missile. And missile-defense critics had always warned about the terroristic possibilities of, say, a nuclear "suitcase bomb." But the September 11 attacks gave missile defense a political boost--Senate Democrats dropped their objections to Bush's missile-defense spending plans--and, on further reflection, should help the intellectual argument for it as well.

Donald Rumsfeld's emphasis on "homeland defense," ridiculed so often as a retrograde, isolationist impulse, certainly seems prescient now. Of course, no one would have predicted the form of the recent attacks, which didn't come via ballistic missile or suitcase. We have been reminded that attacks are often unexpected. So we probably shouldn't believe the blithe assurances of missile-defense critics that no foreign leader will ever be "crazy" enough to threaten or launch a ballistic-missile attack on the United States. This assurance is based on the idea that deterrence always works, that the U.S. can wave the magic wand of its retaliatory capability and never be attacked. Well, deterrence failed with bin Laden and the Taliban.

The fact is that our opponents don't always operate on the same reasonable assumptions that we do; they do not necessarily value their survival more than the chance to commit mass murder. And the regimes that don't share these assumptions, that sponsor terrorism, are exactly the ones that are also pursuing weapons of mass destruction and the ballistic missiles to deliver them. They do so because nukes would increase their leverage over their neighbors and the United States--making a war on terrorism, for example, much more difficult to wage. Missile defense is a way of checking the power of these states, of neutralizing one way they have of threatening America and possibly killing its citizens.

Spending 3 percent of the defense budget on this protection is a prudent investment, against the day that the September 11 attacks are made--God forbid--to look amateurish and small-bore.

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