Archive [April 2000]

A sobering interview, my friends, with the distinguished security policy expert, but of critical importance. Mr. Gaffney is the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy (www.security-policy.org), and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy under President Reagan.

Rush: Frank, I’m grateful that you’ve given me this time. A lot of people sent me a recent column of yours about technology transfers that we’re allowing.

Gaffney: Export administration.

Rush: Yes. It’s a brilliant, brilliant piece, and I wanted to ask you to elaborate on that, because I think foreign policy is something that’s been so woefully ignored in this Administration and in this campaign so far.

Gaffney: You’re absolutely right. And let me say that frankly I believe there’s one man in America who can change the fact that the campaign is ignoring this, and put it front and center, and that’s you. Honest to God, if we can’t get you and your megaphone engaged in this thing, it’s going to be a very difficult deal.

The reason I say this is the man who defeated the CTBT, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, is the man I’m talking to. No question about it, Rush. There were a lot of other guys who played important roles, former Secretary of Defense Jim Schlesinger being one of them, but at the end of the day you are the guy who made these Senators understand that Americans actually cared about this. Had that not happened, they wouldn’t have had that vote and they would be trying to ratify that Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty right now.

Rush: Didn’t you write subsequently that they’re going to come back and try it again?

Gaffney: In fact, I met yesterday with General John Shalikashvilli, the former Chairman of the Joint chiefs of staff who’s on point to try to sell this thing.

Rush: You mean, eventually get it ratified?

Gaffney: Yes. Shali says he has been assured by the Administration — they promised him — that they wouldn’t try to get it ratified this session of Congress. But I don’t trust these people, Rush, and I don’t think you do, either. I think it they saw an opportunity to try to jam it back into the Senate for the purposes of helping Al Gore or embarrassing Republicans, they would do it in a heartbeat.

Rush: Oh, yes.

Gaffney: That’s why it was so important to get the vote last fall, and why you were so instrumental. But here’s the thing. Shali is going to try to help them. I laid out the arguments against ratification yesterday, but he’s going to try to resuscitate it — if not for this year, for next year.

Rush: If this is all true, how come I am still alive? I would think I would be such a target.

Gaffney: I have wondered that for a long time, Rush. The only explanation is the Lord’s got something in store for you, pal. And thank God He does! Rush, March 23 was the seventeenth anniversary of President Reagan’s SDI speech, possibly the last one he’s alive for. I believe, Rush, that missile defense is the single foreign policy issue that, in a time of peace and prosperity without an obvious imminent threat, the American people can relate to as a problem that they can actually say needs to be fixed.

Rush: Well, maybe if we call it the Bud Shuster Outer Space Highway Defense Plan it’ll pass.

Gaffney: I hadn’t thought of that, but you broke the code.

Rush: Whatever it takes. I want to get to SDI but first let me just ask you: Of all the hot spots in the world, which is most worrisome to you?

Gaffney: Unfortunately, there’s a lot of competition for this dubious distinction. But the one I worry most about is North Korea. You have a country run by a certifiable lunatic who is in the process of physically destroying the place, literally — I mean, scorched earth — and who has probably arrived at, or will shortly arrive at the calculation that he’s got nothing to lose. That same individual, that same system that supports him, is acquiring the means by which to rain immense death and destruction on the people of the United States. Evidence of what I say can be found in the fact that, simply by having shot a missile over Japan in August of 1998, he has already begun to euchre the United States into making enormous political and geostrategic concessions that are, I think, aimed at appeasing him, helping him remain in business, amazingly enough.

Rush: What’s his name?

Gaffney: Kim Jong II, the son of Kim II Sung, who is the lunatic who brought North Korea into business and waged the Korean War against us. But his son now has a capacity, or will shortly have the capacity, to do harm to this country in a way that his father only dreamt of. Today, guess who is the largest supplier of foreign aid to North Korea?

Rush: The Clinton Administration.

Gaffney: Uncle Sam. You and I. Thanks to the Clinton Administration, the American taxpayer is the largest supplier of foreign aid to the communist lunatic despotic government of Kim Jong II.

Rush: Why are they of greater concern to you than what’s going on now with China-Taiwan and our apparent reluctance to defend Taiwan?

Gaffney: As I say, there’s a lot of competition for this. I worry about Iran, too. You’ve got a bunch of mullahs whose declared theology is that the shortcut to Paradise is to kill infidels. They’ve just been largely repudiated by their people. They’re clinging to power, including the national security apparatus. They’re getting weapons of mass destruction from North Korea and Russia and China and elsewhere. They worry me. And you’re absolutely right. China is, at the moment, threatening to attack the United States with nuclear weapons. That’s got to be a concern as well. How do you weigh these things out? One hopes that there remains some element of rationality in some of these countries, though it s not self-evident.

Rush: But you can’t use that as a defense policy.

Gaffney: You certainly shouldn’t. Though that is the Clinton Administration’s view. That and arms control are what the Administration believes we should rely upon as a defense policy. My view, of course, is that you rely upon deterrence to the extent that can deter people — and that’s not clear when it’s mullahs or Kim Jong II or maybe even the Chinese. By the way, the Chinese have said, “We will be willing to trade you cities, millions of people, if it comes to our sovereignty in Taiwan.” Believe that in addition to deterrence, you have to have an insurance policy, and that’s where missile defense come in.

Rush: Well, Frank, let me ask you. Given the threat that you’ve just described represented by North Korea, do we have time to build and deploy a successful missile defense to protect us against anything North Korea might do? I know that’s not an argument not to do it.

Gaffney: No, it’s a very relevant argument. In fact, it is the argument at the moment. The Administration takes the position that we can’t do anything about a threat from North Korea or any of these other countries for at least five more years, maybe longer.

Rush: Anything?

Gaffney: Anything. We cannot deploy. The fastest we could possibly deploy any kind of missile defense for the American people in the face of these imminent, if not actually present dangers, is five years. That is into the second term or the successor’s term of the man we’re going to elect in November. That simply boggles the mind. It’s unacceptable.

But there is something we could do, and could do faster. Thanks to the investment that you and I and our fellow taxpayers have made over the past 20-odd years, we have deployed 55 ships, called Aegis ships, all over the world. I like to say, as the Visa commercial does, “They’re everywhere you want them to be.”

These ships currently have no capacity to defend against missile attacks. But because we have the ships, and therefore the platforms, the launchers, we have missiles going into those launchers now. We have sensors. We have communications systems. We have the people to operate them all, already bought and paid for, already doing their jobs right now.

Essentially what we need to do, in my view, on an emergency basis, is modify the front end of those missiles and perhaps tweak the software and otherwise adapt the system in relatively minor ways, and in very short order we could begin providing the American people with a limited defense — which beats the hell out of the nothing we’ve got right now.

Rush: Yes, you’ve got to have some deterrence.

Gaffney: Seventeen years after President Reagan said we need a missile defense, we still can’t stop even one missile. And if the Clinton Administration or the Gore Administration has its way, I believe we won’t ever have a missile defense. I hope George Bush will make this an issue, defining himself in part as the guy who not only wants missile defense, but the guy who’s going to get it for the American people now, when we need it.

Rush: Have you been consulted at all by the Bush people?

Gaffney: I have talked to the Bush people, but it’s usually at my initiative rather than theirs. I’m not working for the campaign and don’t have any relationship to them.

Rush: Have they shown any interest when you’ve attempted to advise them or educate them as to your concerns?

Gaffney: It depends on who you talk to. There are some friends of mine with whom I’ve worked closely over the years, and who are generally receptive to this point, and understand not only the strategic imperative here, but also the political benefit to candidate Bush — who is largely, let’s face it, tabula rasa on national security, and who needs ways to demonstrate that he has some good ideas that the public can understand and relate to.

Rush: Why are Gore, Clinton, and the rest so opposed, not just to a missile defense, but to defending America at all? Is it money? Is it that they’d rather spend money on social things and just roll the dice on foreign policy?

Gaffney: Interestingly, I think Gore, to a far greater degree than Clinton, is a real ideologue. I think Clinton didn’t know much about this stuff, had generally bad instincts, but relied heavily on the people that he brought around him — like Strobe Talbott and Morton Halperin and Tony Lake and Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright. They’re all people who cut their teeth in the antiwar movement, worked for or with the Dukakises and the Mondales and the McGoverns of the Democratic Party — basically the “Blame America First” crowd, as Ambassador Kirkpatrick memorably put it. I think this is what Clinton adopted as his coloration; but it is what Al Gore believes. He is of a piece with this crowd.

You asked a question specifically about missile defense. If you go back — I’ll never forget it — to 1991, when we had the last great debate, such as it was, about missile defense, in the aftermath of the attack that killed 23 Americans who happened to be in a barracks struck by a Scud missile in Desert Storm. Very few people, even Democrats, wanted to continue to espouse, at least explicitly, the position that vulnerability to missile attack was a good thing. A bill was put together that made its way all the way through the Senate, all the way through the House, all the way through conference, and was signed by President Bush into law. It said: The American people will be defended against a missile attack. We will deploy a single, ground-based missile defense system in North Dakota by 1996.

Do you know who led the fight in the Senate Armed Services Committee and on the floor of the United States Senate and in the conference against that act? Albert Gore, Jr., you know what he said at the time? He said, and I’m paraphrasing, “This bill is going to be enacted over my prostrate body, because among other things, my father was the Floor Manager of the ABM Treaty in 1972. I am committed to the ABM Treaty. I believe it to be the cornerstone of strategic stability.”

Gore is, in short, genetically predisposed to this damn thing, as well as a matter of fundamental faith. Because the theology of arms control, as we talked about in the context of the CTBT, is what’s going on here. These are people who actually believe that you can make treaties with people who don’t honor treaties, and have that be a more reliable basis for your security than providing for your security through military means. They don’t like the military. They have tried over the years to eviscerate it, and have never been more successful than under the eight years of this Administration. Specifically when it comes to nuclear issues and the relationship with our “strategic partners” — also known as our adversaries — such as the former superpower of Russia, the future superpower China, these are people who honestly believe that the world will be safer if America is not powerful and is not capable of threatening anybody and is, in fact, checked in its own ambitions by being very vulnerable to attack.

Rush: These people are simply in denial of history then.

Gaffney: That’s putting it charitably. Yes, they’ve learned nothing from history — or, worse yet, they’ve learned all the wrong lessons from it.

Rush: What treaty was it that brought down the Soviet Union?

Gaffney: Exactly my point.

Rush: Not long ago we learned that there was a four-day computer crash at the National Security Agency. This is something that’s not discussed much: the NSA and what they do. You read more about it in espionage novels than you do in day-to-day news coverage. How serious was that, and what role does the NSA actually play in our defense?

Gaffney: The NSA is probably the single most important component of our national security today, in my judgment, because it basically is the means by which the United States gleans most of the useful intelligence that is available to decision-makers. Now, this is not to discount what we learn from what are called overhead imaging satellites. But it’s the voice communications, it’s the faxes, it’s the intercepted cellular phone conversations, it’s the emails that the NSA has been able to collect, analyze and make available to the national security and law enforcement community that are probably in today’s world — where lots of things are hidden, by the way, from overhead satellites — critical to our security and our ability to fight drug traffickers and money launderers and so on.

The bad guys around the world are assiduously working to render the NSA impotent. They are encrypting communications, they are using fiber optic transmission lines and other means that are, if not impenetrable, difficult and time consuming for the NSA to penetrate. What that means, Rush, is that people who need to know what is going on in that terrorist cell or in that drug trafficking operation or in that military headquarters will not be able to know it, certainly will not be able to know in a timely way. That’s a very serious and dangerous development. We talked about the EAA, the Export Administration Act. Part of those changes that are reducing the value and the capabilities of our NSA, I’m afraid, are being made possible by the export of American technology to bad guys.

Rush: Frank, speaking of that, I just read today that we’re going to start selling F-16s that are more technologically advanced than the ones in our own air force.

Gaffney: I believe that to be correct — to the United Arab Emirates, not exactly a front-line ally of ours. But this is what we’re now reduced to. Because frankly, if we don’t sell this kind of stuff, what’s left of our defense industry is going to decline even more, increasing even further the costs to our armed forces of maintaining its capabilities.

We’ve got an incredible cycle here, Rush, where the only way we can pay for the kind of military we need is by either selling the best of our hardware to other people or trying to come up with the money to defend against it when it’s used against us.

But another point on the NSA; what’s really troubling to me is that you’re seeing now, Rush, a sustained, and I must tell you, I think orchestrated campaign against the NSA brought to you in part by our allies in Europe, brought to you in part by the left wing of this country that, as I discussed, blames America first, wants America’s intelligence capabilities reduced.

Think back to it. The counterculture was opposed to what? The very pillars of national security that we’re seeing under assault: the intelligence community, the law-enforcement community, the military, the rule of law itself. And all of them are — as you know better than I and have done more to help try to prevent — under siege.

But what’s being said is that the NSA is collecting a lot of information that is actually compromising the civil rights of Americans, and is being used for commercial advantage by our companies, and we mustn’t let this happen. Heaven forfend that the French, who’ve been doing this for a couple of hundred years, would suffer as a result of our efforts to have our government help our businesses. But the point is that in the name of civil liberty — and I believe in civil liberty, as I know you do — we are going to see, I’m afraid, an effort to reign in, dumb down and otherwise reduce this critical source of information to a critical component of our national security establishment. This will compound the problem that for technical and export control reasons the NSA is already reeling from.

Rush: They’re actually claiming the NSA is spying our communications.

Gaffney: And helping business, God forbid.

Rush: Let me get to your column on technology transfers. You wrote that the Republican Senate is giving Clinton political cover for these transfers, and that’s what stunned me. After what we went through with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and everything else, why are the Republicans participating? I guess I could ask the same question, why are the Republicans participating in opposing a tax cut? I can’t figure out the politics of it. It just can’t be that they’re afraid of Clinton. It’s got to be something else.

Gaffney: The politics of this are very straightforward, Rush. The industry groups, specifically the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), has made the centerpiece of their lobbying efforts this year getting a new Export Administration Act that will essentially eviscerate what’s left of our export controls.

They’re doing that because their companies believe that, since there’s no threat anymore, since there’s no Cold War, there’s no danger, there’s no national security to worry about anymore. Even these aerospace companies, for God sake, who know better, say: “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be allowed to sell to whoever we want to, or whoever wants our products.” Anybody who tries to get in the way, anybody who tries to say, “Wait a minute, there is national security, or there better be, and we need to evaluate the sale on the basis of it,” is an impediment to commerce.

At the moment, some in the Republican-led Senate, unfortunately, have been pushing manfully to earn the campaign contributions of these export-oriented industries by doing their bidding. They have been trying basically to steamroll this thing through. But they have been resisted by an array of people who have national security portfolios or just a sense of responsibility in the area: Fred Thompson and Jon Kyl and others like John Warner and Jesse Helms have been really throwing their bodies in front of the train.

Rush: Where did McCain come down on this?

Gaffney: He was not, I think, particularly helpful during the course of the campaign, if he spoke about it at all.

Rush: But isn’t this a classic example of the special interests that he talked about?

Gaffney: It is. It is a vintage example of the special interests. It’s just that in this case, they’re the sort of special interests that the Chairman of the Commerce Committee is allied with.

Rush: Frank, this is not inspiring.

Gaffney: Actually I hope it is inspiring, Rush, because it’s the kind of thing that when you put the kleig light on it, the guys like Fred Thompson and Jon Kyl who are up there basically doing this all by themselves suddenly have the phones lighting up, with people saying: “What you’re doing is important and what they’re doing is scandalous, and you must stop it at once.” If there’s anything that does still have an impact on these scoundrels, it is when suddenly somebody notices what they’re doing. I hope it’s inspiring in the sense that it reinforces the point that you really have the capacity to make a difference.

Rush: When I say it’s not inspiring, what I mean is that the notion that there are good guys is evaporating here.

Gaffney: Yes, there are good guys, such as Jon Kyl and those I mentioned. All of this keeps coming back to the point that we have a moment of opportunity here. The next six or eight months are going to determine whether we get either a guy who is going to be even worse than Bill Clinton, hard as that is to imagine, because he does believe in all the wrong things, or whether we’re going to get a guy in the person of Bush who we can help make this portfolio an issue, to make him be as robust as he can possibly be, and to create mandates for this man, starting I hope in the missile defense area. I know we can get traction there, that will actually translate into a new administration that may be more Reaganesque.

Rush: Hopefully so. On another front, Defense Secretary William Cohen is off to Vietnam celebrating the 25th anniversary of their victory. Clinton slated to go this year. What’s up with this? What is the point and who are they trying to serve with this? Isn’t this a slap in the face to people?

Gaffney: I would think so. When Cohen went over there these guys went out of their way to impress upon him, and upon their own people, that they were, in fact, the victors and that they were tolerating the presence in their midst of a representative of the defeated power: the United States. There was no real effort to suggest that they really are now committed to moving on the path of Western, free market, democratic principles.

If we want to actually help bring about a democratic-regime there, that’s one thing. But this is the problem. If you look at Castro’s Cuba, if you look at Kim Jong ll’s North Korea, if you look at the Vietnamese, if you look at Iran, if you look even at Iraq, to say nothing of Syria or Libya, the Administration has basically established as their agenda for the Clinton legacy normalizing relations with every bad guy on the planet. That is not only an affront to American moral values and sensibilities — it is very dangerous in terms of the country’s national interests.

Rush: And it’s saddling his successor with problems that are too horrific to ponder.

Gaffney: Exactly right. It’s the perfect McGeneration policy-making: expediency driven, of the moment, instant gratification, the devil-take-the-hindmost as to what comes after.

Rush: What’s Saddam Hussein up to? And what are we doing about it?

Gaffney: Saddam Hussein is getting back in business as rapidly as he can. He is enjoying twitting us along the trail, humiliating us. But what he’s really got his eye on is getting back into the weapons of mass destruction and power projection business that will permit him to be not only a regional superpower again, but also to be a player on the international stage in a way that he hasn’t been since he was humiliated, but not defeated, in Desert Storm.

What are doing about it? The answer is we are acquiescing to the inevitable unraveling of the so-called sanctions regime and international inspections regime that were put in place in lieu of defeating Saddam Hussein.

Rush: We’re letting him start selling oil, aren’t we?

Gaffney: We’ve been dressing it up as justifying it on the grounds that the money will actually go to the starving people in his country who are starving because he’s willfully denying them the food and resources that would keep them from starving. This is the fundamental thing, Rush, that I believe must be communicated — and nobody can do it better than you — to the American people. What we’re dealing with in people like Saddam Hussein and people like Kim Jong II and, for that matter, people like the Chinese and people like, if not Putin himself, his predecessors, the people he lionizes like Stalin and Andropov, is people who have no, no interest in the lives of their own people. How dare we presume that they will care about ours? To the contrary, they relish the prospect of being able to harm us, and if along the trail, in order to buy their weapons or to build their missiles or to exercise their power, they have to kill even millions of their own people, they will do it without a moment’s thought.

That’s the message. In this post-Cold-War era, this post-Communist era, people fail to appreciate the quality of evil we continue to deal with or continue to confront, and will more so in the future as they become better armed, thanks to our technology or our money.

This is another story, Rush, which we really need to spend a little bit of time on. They’re coming to our markets, our capital markets, our debt and equity markets, to get unknowing, unwitting American investors through their mutual funds and their pension funds and their life insurance portfolios and their corporate and even personal stock portfolios to pay money that they can use to arm the People’s Liberation Army, the PLA, to steal our technology, to proliferate weapons of mass destruction, to engage in genocide and terrorism and the like. This is another message of the kind of evil that is abroad in the world. Practically no American leaders are alerting their constituents to, let alone helping them be equipped, in the case of the capital markets, with the transparency that will tell them when a PetroChina, for example — a company owned by the largest Chinese oil company — comes to market in the next few weeks and tries to get as much as $10 billion to go do with as they will. Americans have no idea that this is a state-owned company, doing business with Sudan, which wants to despoil Tibet.

Rush: And India and Pakistan, that seems to be a brewing hot spot, and I don’t know that a lot of people understand why it effects us.

Gaffney: The fact that both countries have nuclear weapons could mean that it will affect us if they go to war again, as they have done repeatedly, by having radiation in the atmosphere that rains down on our cities. You have some lunatic elements in both of these countries, and you could have escalation, but I’m hoping that it is true that the fact that both of them could do incalculable harm to each other, now means that they can’t actually go to war, certainly not as they have in the past. Therefore, it becomes more of a local dispute. But having said that, what’s really driving this is not India and Pakistan; India is confronting China. Pakistan is a proxy for China. India, I believe, is a country with whom we actually do need to develop a closer relationship and, while I have very serious misgivings about the Clinton Administration and what it’s likely to do, I do think that sound American policy would try to bring India, the world’s largest democracy, into the community of Western-oriented, genuinely democratic nations with whom we make common cause.

Rush: How’s he going to do that? He added Pakistan to his recent trip because they donated to his wife’s Senate campaign. That seems to be the guiding principle of his foreign policy.

Gaffney: You’re absolutely right. This is where we let them off the hook by not talking about national security. As bad as their record has been on the domestic front — and you again have done more than any other human being probably to document it — it really pales by comparison to the damage they’ve done to our longterm national security and foreign policy interests. Not making that a centerpiece of the indictment against these guys and the campaign to bring about an end to their regime is, I think, an invitation to extending that regime, to say nothing of compounding the damage they’ve already done.

Rush: You’re right. Thanks much, Frank, I appreciate it.

Gaffney: God bless you, Rush. Thank you more than words can say.

Rush: Same to you.