It's good to be ready: North Korea, missile defense, and crappy reporting

Remember how Ronald Reagan was ridiculed over his efforts to build a missle defense system? This was in my early days as a conservative and I could never understand why the media and the Democrats would dismiss a missile defense system for our country as “Star Wars.” They said that it would make the world a more dangerous place (I never did understand that argument), that it would never work, that it would take too long to develop, and that we didn’t need it.

With a hat tip to Barking Moonbat, who has a must-see cartoon on his post, here is the latest development on our deployment of the missile defense system in response to Kim Jong-Il’s plans to launch a test missle with the potential to reach Alaska and, some say, parts of the continental United States if launched over a polar route. From Reuters:

WASHINGTON—The United States has activated its ground-based interceptor missile-defense system amid concerns over an expected North Korean missile launch, a U.S. defense official said on Tuesday. Pentagon officials declined to say whether they would try to shoot down any missile launched by the reclusive Communist state, but other U.S. officials have said that is unlikely, assuming the launch is aimed at open water.


The United States has said it would be a provocation if North Korea launched the missile, which some experts said could reach Alaska. Many U.S. experts say Pyongyang has a legal right to test, and there are questions about the reliability of U.S. missile defenses.



Pyongyang had no immediate comment, but a North Korean official said earlier the country does not feel bound by pledges to halt test firings of long-range missiles. A U.S. defense official confirmed a Washington Times report that the Pentagon had switched its multibillion-dollar missile-defense system from test mode to operational.



“It’s good to be ready,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Pentagon spokesman Eric Ruff, asked whether the United States would try to shoot down a North Korean missile, said: “We have a limited missile-defense system. … We don’t discuss the alert status or the specific capabilities.”



The United States has built a complex of interceptor missiles, advanced radar stations and data relays designed to detect and shoot down an enemy missile.

Not surprisingly, the article goes on to quote two liberals (and, of course, refuses to identify them as such) who get their panties in a wad about the possibility of us shooting down a North Korean missle. I’m not going to do the spell out all the research because it would make this post needlessly long but you can find interesting information about the two critics if you just Google Philip Coyle (note especially this and this) and John Isaacs (note especially this, this, and this). Let’s just say that they have political axes to grind and that Reuters is too crappy of a journalistic operation to let their readers know this fact.

The names of the critics are different, but their goal of not instituting a missle system to protect  the United States is the same.