The Bush regime desperately wants to re-start Star Wars, or 'Son of Star Wars.' They had hoped their plan to proliferate their 'missile defense' technology to European provinces to counter Iran would get a boost from all of their flailing around over the North Korean missile launches.

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It's really no surprise at all that Defense chief Donald Rumsfeld is cranking up the 'missile defense' propaganda, calling for new tests. Although, it was curious to see Rumsfeld this week play down the effectiveness of our nation's missile defense capability when, unprompted, he described the possibility of shooting down a North Korean missile as less than a sure thing.

Asked at a news conference Monday whether he thought the 'shields' we have in place are ready to defend us against a North Korean missile, he hemmed and hawed about the need for further testing of the system before he could be certain. "I want to see it happen," Rumsfeld told reporters. "A full end-to-end" demonstration is needed "where we actually put all the pieces" of the highly complex and far-flung missile defense system together and see whether it would succeed in destroying a warhead in flight.

His leader, Bush, was decidedly more optimistic in July, although he doesn't know any more than what he's told by the military industry cronies that infect his government. "Our missile systems are modest, our anti-ballistic missile systems are modest," Bush explained at a press conference July 7.

"They're new. It's new research. We've gotten -- testing them. And so I can't -- it's hard for me to give you a probability of success . . . I think we had a reasonable chance of shooting it (the NK missile) down." he said.

What else could Bush say? Mostly obscured by the 9-11 tragedy, the ambition to restart Reagan's 'Star Wars' boondoggle was a principle part of the Bush transition team's agenda. The 'Vulcans', reportedly named by Condi Rice after a statue of a Greek god in her hometown, included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and other PNAC regulars there to flesh out Bush's new foreign policy and tell him who to choose for his Cabinet.

Rumsfeld was chosen by Bush as defense chief to usher in the next cash cow for the military industry: Space-Based Weaponry. In 2000, he chaired the Rumsfeld Commission a.k.a.: "Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States"

Wolfowitz was on the board, and Iraq reconstruction's Gen. Jay Garner was there too. The propped up space commission; the invention of Rep. Curt Weldon of Pa. (a frequent traveler to Russia and a friend of the Russian elite), was formed to refute the CIA's assessment that Star Wars was costly, unnecessary, and unworkable. Not surprisingly the commission came down in favor of restarting the Space nuclear race.

But, back then, the focus was on China as well as on North Korea. Bush promptly broke off talks with Korea and basically pretended that his new 'tough' stance had intimidated them. The Bush regime at that time was convinced that their hardening would be more effective than President Clinton's approach which they claimed was appeasement. Of course, the North Koreans called their bluff, and used that break off in dialog and monitoring to build a couple of nukes.

Back in 2001, Rumsfeld cited China's build-up of missiles, as he justified the Bush administration's announced intention to restart star-wars. "The truth is that the Chinese have been building more, they are building more, they are going to build more - quite apart from any ABM treaty," Rumsfeld told CNN.

Bush talked up the renewal of the Star Wars program during the campaign, money was put into research, and the program has been waiting for resistance to his bloody occupations to fade so they could reduce those commitments and pump more money into an initiative that some have termed "Son of Star Wars.'

Back in May there were 'Chinese military buildup' reports coming from the Pentagon, which were old and deliberately released to discredit China, isolating them and their vote in advance of the Security Council action against Iran that the Bush regime had been pushing for. The weapon's systems the Pentagon and US analysts were citing are no secret and have been under development for years. There was no surprising new threat.

The Financial Times reported that, "it was unclear what aspects of Beijing's development of its nuclear missile forces had surprised US analysts. The report merely cited information about the introduction of new weapons such as the solid-fueled, road-mobile DF-31 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which has been under development for decades.

The North Korean missile launches gave the Bush regime the pretext, and also the vain need, to crank up the old rhetoric about the need for a missile defense system as a beat-all for some threat they've conjured from North Korea's unproven, Taepo-dong 2 missile. It also gave the Bush regime an election season opportunity to bash anyone who still opposes throwing more money at technology which has yet to prove itself capable; even after the appropriation of all the tax dollars that have been wasted on corporations like Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and the other pigs at the trough.

So, there was Bush in July . . . boasting about a U.S. missile defense that won't work as a response to North Korean missiles that wouldn't fly right. It made perfect sense to him to use his most costly propaganda weapon against North Korea's. Neither leader is actually looking to take the other out. They need each other as desperately as Bush needs Iran to continue his campaign of fear, and to continue in his self-appointed role as the nation's savior from the bloody conflicts he himself encourages, prosecutes, and perpetuates with his militarism.

If there was no nemesis for Bush to point to then there wouldn't be any apparent need for elaborate defenses, aggression, or provocation across borders. Why would we need a new generation of bunker-busting nuclear weapons for if there wasn't the manufactured threat from imagined underground nuclear weapons labs in Iran?

Why do we need an elaborate missile shield if there is no credible threat? The threat from North Korea is their main justification for a missile defense system. NK's Taepo-dong 1 missile can only carry a 1,000-kilogram nuclear bomb for about 2,500 kilometers, short of U.S. territory. It could also carry lighter biological or chemical weapons for 4,100 kilometers, but it would still fall about 400 kilometers short of Alaska and the Hawaii islands. 126

Similarity, the Taepo-dong 2 missile, when fully operational, is only expected to barely reach Alaska.

The General Accounting Office cautioned, in a 40-page report released in Sept. 2003, that the Bush administration's push to deploy a $22 billion missile defense system by that year would lead to unforeseen cost increases and technical failures that will have to be fixed before it can hope to stop enemy warheads. The GAO report said the Pentagon was combining 10 crucial technologies into a missile defense system without knowing if they can handle the task. The GAO report faulted the stepped-up schedule proposed by Bush for 'premature integration.'

"As a result, there is greater likelihood that critical technologies will not work as intended in planned flight tests," the GAO said, which could force the Pentagon to spend more funds than expected or "accept a less capable system". But, despite the GAO report, the DoD has budgeted approximately $10 billion a year over the next five years to fund the missile defense program, and appropriators approved $9.1billion to be spent on the system.

So, today Rumsfeld announced that he was going to get another 'test' of the missile defense system, firing a missile from Kodiak Island, Alaska, to be intercepted by a rocket fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It won't be the "full end-to-end test" he said he wanted. It's really not much of a test at all.

"We are not going to try to hit the target," said Scott Fancher, head of Boeing Co.'s ground-based missile defense program. "It is not a primary or secondary test objective to hit the target."

"Why not proceed in an orderly way with the kind of the test expert people want to do?" Rumsfeld rationalized. "They do not have to do it to demonstrate to you."

Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry "Trey" Obering III, director of the Missile Defense Agency, says that although the rocket might hit the missile, that's not really the point of the test, even though it's being described as the largest missile defense test since the last failed one 18 months ago.

So why all the blather from Rumsfeld now about the missile defense boondoggle? It could be that he sees this as his last opportunity to deliver for his defense industry cronies, the ones who keep him in power. Or, he could be working a Rovian ploy to stop the bleeding of Bush's credibility on issues of national defense over his mishandling of Iraq and his inability to catch bin-Laden.

There's another reason for the re-emergence of the missile defense canard that hasn't gotten much ink.

The Pentagon was set back in May to ask Congress for a $1.6b 'anti-missile' base in Eastern Europe to defend against, what they claimed, is a threat to the region from Iran's ballistic missiles. Under consideration were sites in countries like Poland and the Czech Republic. The Iran card was a perfect play at the time, as North Korea hadn't yet launched their missiles. But there was no more of a credible threat from nuclear weapons from Iran than from anyone else.

"As far as we can tell," Gary Samore, former aide on the National Security Council was quoted in a NYT article Aug. 26, "Iran is many years away from having the capability to deliver a military strike against the U.S. If they made a political decision to seriously pursue a space launch vehicle, it would take them a decade or more to develop the capability to launch against the U.S."

The proposal was a flop in Central Europe. The countries under consideration immediately balked at the prospect of aligning with the U.S. against a major economic ally of Russia. Outgoing Czech Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek said just last week that the U.S. won't be building a missile defense base in the Czech Republic.

In fact, the U.S. reportedly made "discreet inquiries" in Britain in early August to see whether they would take the 'Son of Star Wars' systems that Central Europe had spurned. There's a good possibility that Britain turned down the bogus system as well. And they should turn it down. The missile defense scam is nothing more than a feathering of the aerospace industry coffers at the expense of other costly priorities for legitimate and necessary defenses.

The Bush regime desperately wants to re-start Star Wars, or 'Son of Star Wars.' Hawking their rejected earmarks for missile defense R&D was their first thought. Then, they hoped their plan to proliferate their 'missile defense' technology to European provinces 'to counter Iran' would get a boost from all of their flailing around over the NK launches.

It's a war campaign for Bush and his republican cowboys from now until the November elections. If the Bush regime has their way, missile defense will be one of the wedge weapons in their rhetorical arsenal. The result shouldn't be any more effective than this latest orchestrated demonstration of their phony system.

Authors Bio:
Ron Fullwood, is an activist from Columbia, Md. and the author of the book 'Power of Mischief' : Military Industry Executives are Making Bush Policy and the Country is Paying the Price