I think that since we now know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election.
- Hillary Clinton, yesterday
LEHRER: New question, two minutes, Senator Kerry.
If you are elected president, what will you take to that office thinking is the single most serious threat to the national security to the United States?
KERRY: Nuclear proliferation.
- Bush-Kerry Presidential Debate, October 8, 2004
I think one of the reasons John Kerry has endorsed Barack Obama for Democratic nomination is that he knows Obama takes the issue of nuclear proliferation seriously.
Unfortunately, I have my doubts about Hillary. Never mind that she has spoken favorably of John McCain's "lifetime of experience", what Clinton implies is her approval of the Republican agenda on national security. An agenda that promotes nuclear proliferation.
Effective Missile Defense
John McCain strongly supports the development and deployment of theater and national missile defenses. Effective missile defenses are critical to protect America from rogue regimes like North Korea that possess the capability to target America with intercontinental ballistic missiles, from outlaw states like Iran that threaten American forces and American allies with ballistic missiles, and to hedge against potential threats from possible strategic competitors like Russia and China. Effective missile defenses are also necessary to allow American military forces to operate overseas without being deterred by the threat of missile attack from a regional adversary.
- From
John McCain 2008
A missile defense system is not only technically complex, inflexible, easily thwarted, and an obscene cash cow for defense contractors(the real reason McBain supports it), it is also a provocation that Russia and China will predictably respond to by increasing the size and scope of their nuclear arsenals.
Bottom line: you can't be serious about nuclear non-proliferation and be FOR national missile defense.
Obama has been shy about being against a missile defense systems outright. On a video posted on the "Obama '08" web site, he says,
I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space.
However, on Obama's Senate site he says this,
The Bush Administration has been developing plans to deploy interceptors and radar systems in Poland and the Czech Republic as part of a missile defense system designed to protect against the potential threat of Iranian nuclear armed missiles. If we can responsibly deploy missile defenses that would protect us and our allies we should – but only when the system works. We need to make sure any missile defense system would be effective before deployment.
From a Presidential campaign perspective this is understandable because so many in the DoD establishment have been trying to sell these bogus systems since the '50s. And Democrats since Raygun's bizarre Star Wars daydream address to the nation have scrambled to prove they can be strong on national security while being kinda reality-based, and somewhat lucid. But as happens sometimes, things change.
In the early 1990s, the Clinton administration canceled every Pentagon program that smacked of an offensive use of space. And in its anxiety to preserve the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, the historic cornerstone of arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, and later Russia, it also put SDI on the slowest of back-burners.
Today, however, the ABM treaty has gone, 11 September has turned national security into a paranoia, while North Korea is reportedly close to developing a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to hit Alaska. The largely pacifist Clinton policy of 1996 is about to be replaced by a far more forceful doctrine, designed to prevent what Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, once called "a space Pearl Harbor".
Any candidate taking a position against these systems is immediately attacked for being weak on defense as national security as a paranoia has permeated conventional political posturing. Hillary Clinton has been well aware of this for some time, and has taken action.
Unlike 21 of her Democratic colleagues at the time, Clinton supported going to war in Iraq and has rejected calls for a timetable to begin bringing U.S. troops home.
She supported Condoleezza Rice's nomination as secretary of State — 12 Democrats voted no — and was one of six Democrats last year opposed to blocking deployment of an untested national missile defense system.
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USA Today, 7/18/2005
Hillary Clinton is also well aware that Obama's foreign policy and national security experience is extends beyond a speech he made in 2002. It's a flat out lie, and she should be called on it.
In August 2005, Obama traveled with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) to nuclear and biological weapons destruction facilities in the former Soviet Union, where they urged the destruction of conventional weapons stockpiles. With Lugar, Obama introduced the Cooperative Proliferation Detection, Interdiction Assistance, and Conventional Threat Reduction Act, which passed as part of the Department of State Authorities Act of 2006.
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Council on Foreign Relations
Clearly, Clinton wants to look tough on national security. Sadly, to do this, she has decided to embrace Republican standards for being a credible Commander in Chief. She has also vigorously attempted to diminish Obama's experience and achievements. She has also diminished the policy accomplishments of her husband's Administration. You can look at these tactics and say they're just politics. But, is she willing to risk an expanded nuclear arms race just so she can look tough on missile defense? It also raises questions regarding how willing any future Clinton Administration would be to greasing the wheels for Defense industries seeking missile defense contracts.
Hillary is asking her party to see her as the most qualified person to answer that emergency 3 a.m. phone call. But her own fear of looking weak has driven her to accept a Republican national security agenda. An agenda that would make such a paranoid fantasy that much closer to an actual nuclear catastrophe.