Cato Daily Dispatch for October 2, 2003
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President Wants $600 Million More for WMD SearchNorth Korea: We're Making Nukes
Republicans Push for Prescription Drug Benefit
President Wants $600 Million More for WMD Search
"The Bush administration is seeking more than $600 million from Congress to continue the hunt for conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein's government had an illegal weapons program," reports The New York Times. "The money, part of the White House's request for $87 billion in supplemental spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, comes on top of at least $300 million that has already been spent on the weapons search, the officials said."
Separately, according to press reports, David Kay, who headed the CIA's search for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, was expected to confirm earlier speculation that his team had failed to discover any banned weapons.
In "Weapons of Mass Distraction," Charles Peña writes: "The discovery of such weapons would not justify the war. Nor would it vindicate the administration because the administration will still have to explain how Iraq posed a direct and imminent threat to the United States. Defeating Iraq's military in three weeks is evidence that Iraq did not pose a military threat.
"The possibility, acknowledged by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that the Iraqis might have destroyed their WMD prior to or during the war only reinforces the notion that they were not a threat. More importantly, if the Iraqis had chemical or biological weapons but did not use them to defend their own country against a foreign invader, how and when were they ever going to use such weapons? Indeed, Saddam appears to have been deterred from using WMD to defend himself even as his regime was crumbling around him."
North Korea: We're Making Nukes
"North Korea said Thursday it is using plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel rods to make atomic weapons, a move that could escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula and raise the stakes in Pyongyang's standoff with the United States," The Associated Press reports.
"The United States and its allies are trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear programs. Pyongyang says it will do so only if the United States signs a nonaggression treaty, provides economic aid and opens diplomatic ties."
According to Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, America should reduce its presence in South Korea and Japan and give those countries the green light to begin developing nuclear weapons of their own. Carpenter expressed those views in a Cato report, "Options for Dealing with North Korea."
"Giving Pyongyang additional rewards in the hope that it will live up to agreements it has already violated would...be a naïve strategy" because of the country's history of breaching nuclear agreements, he says. The most well suited approach would be to "raise the possibility of a regional nuclear balance."
"It is time--indeed, it is well past time--to tell Japan and South Korea that they must provide for their own defense and take responsibility for dealing with security problems in their region," says Carpenter.
In "A Nuclear North Korea? Live with it," from yesterday's South China Morning Post, Carpenter says that if the American diplomatic push is unsuccessful, "we may have to learn to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea, as unpleasant as that prospect might be."
Republicans Push for Prescription Drug Benefit
"A group of Republican House and Senate members is taking an unusual step of launching an advertising campaign to press the GOP to fulfill one of President Bush's campaign promises," according to USA Today. "The ads, which begin airing today in the nation's capital, urge the Republican-controlled Congress to pass legislation giving prescription-drug coverage to the nation's elderly."
A recent Cato Institute Policy Analysis, however, makes the case that Medicare is already insolvent, and adding pricey new benefits to the program will prove costly and unfair to young workers. In "War between the Generations: Federal Spending on the Elderly Set to Explode," Cato Director of Fiscal Policy Chris Edwards and researcher Tad DeHaven argue that Congress should cut spending rather than expand elderly entitlements.
"It is clear that adding an unfunded prescription drug benefit to Medicare moves directly against reform because it puts the program's spending on an even more unsustainable path," they write. "Unfortunately, tomorrow's young taxpayers are not here to defend themselves against the huge burdens that are being foisted on them by Congress."
Edwards and DeHaven say that "the elderly should work more, entitlement programs should be turned into savings-based systems, and the taxation of savings should be reduced to allow families to build bigger retirement nest eggs."
Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org
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