Missiles, Missteps Take Spin

Top Bush administration officials on Sunday defended the president’s controversial decision to develop a large-scale missile defense system and sought to put the best face on a pair of missteps on foreign policy.

In separate television appearances, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asserted that President Bush’s decision to junk the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty en route to deploying a new defense system was being reasonably received by most nations and would not set off a new arms race.

In the case of one nation that has not reacted well--China--Rumsfeld said the missile plan would make little difference.

“China is going to do what it’s going to do,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “What we do with respect to ballistic missile defense . . . is not going to affect one whit what the People’s Republic of China does.”

The comments were the latest evidence that the president intends to move forward with the missile plan, despite an explosion of criticism from Democrats. Bush unveiled his plan Tuesday, saying that threats from nations on the State Department’s list of “states of concern” justified abandoning the ABM treaty on which the global nuclear balance has rested for nearly three decades.

Prominent Democrats zeroed in Sunday on key aspects of the administration’s arguments. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota labeled missile defense “a lemon.” It has repeatedly failed technical tests.

Sen. John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Republicans were wrong in assuming that the system would end the nightmarish policy of mutually assured destruction, which has stopped nuclear powers from using their weapons to date.

“If you have a limited defense that can only shoot down an accidental, unauthorized launch or a rogue nation’s missile, you do not get rid of mutually assured destruction. You cannot,” he said on NBC.

Kerry said the U.S. faces a far greater threat from terrorists packing bombs or releasing biological weapons in its cities. But Rice, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” countered that “no one is saying that one should ignore terrorism or the suitcase bomb. It is a matter of really trying to defend against a full range of threats that would affect America.”

On another matter, the Defense secretary sought to extricate the administration from an embarrassing incident in which his department issued a memo saying it was cutting off all military contact between the U.S. and China, only to retract the document hours later and blame Rumsfeld aide Chris Williams for the mix-up.

Rumsfeld asserted that he intended to review interactions between the two nations’ militaries and cut off only some contact. Williams wrote a memo that was interpreted as ordering a complete cutoff.

“There is no question that I made a mistake. A mistake was made,” Rumsfeld said. “Chris Williams is . . . a world-class person. . . . To the extent there is any fault to be assigned, it certainly is as much mine as anyone else’s.”

The memo comes atop the president’s own apparent zigzag on how far the U.S. would go to defend Taiwan against Chinese military force. The combination has produced a torrent of criticism that has been especially stinging because of administration claims that its foreign policy team is made up of “adults,” in contrast to what it saw as the inexperience of the Clinton team.

Among the critics was William Kristol, conservative publisher of the Weekly Standard, whose magazine in a recent edition blasted the administration in an editorial for making “a mess.”

“So the adults are in charge,” the editorial said, “and yet our policy on the most important strategic question of the coming decade--how to deal with the rising power of China--grows more incoherent with each passing week.”

Bush told a television interviewer two weeks ago that the U.S. would do “whatever it took to help” Taiwan and that deployment of U.S. troops is “certainly an option.” His comments were taken as an abrupt change in U.S. policy, until the administration hastened to say that nothing was different.