(the) American (Novel of)

214 Robin Truth Goodman
didn’t relish American badgering to boost their defense budgets—which
stayed shamefully low compared to U.S. outlays. And, of course, European
leaders couldn’t stand Reaganomics, with its bold plans to trim
taxes and cut wasteful government programs, or its votes against the
United Nations regulatory schemes.” 24 While condemning the popularization
of violence, such anxieties over etiquette justify building cultures
of violence to protect and spread American lifestyles while chastising
the Europeans for not allowing us our military fun.
In the current administration, missile defense has been central to
the building of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s career in both
the private and the public sectors since the Ford administration: the
Rumsfeld Commission had announced in 1998 that both North Korea
and Iran, and probably Iraq, would be able to develop long-range
missiles by 2010. As reported in a post-September 11 U.S. News & World
Report article,
It was a routine evening in the control room deep inside Cheyenne
Mountain, near Colorado Springs, Colo., where U.S. Space
Command keeps its eye on the heavens. Then, just after 9 p.m.,
alarm lights began flashing. Analysts scrambled. A computerized
wall-size map showed the cause—U.S. spy satellites had detected
the heat pattern of a rocket launch from North Korea. . . . The
rocket carried a “third-stage” booster that could have lifted it
into deep space and, once there, to U.S. territory. . . . It hardly
mattered that the text was a failure. . . . That launch, on Aug. 31,
1998, revolutionized the missile defense debate. It effectively
changed the question from whether to build a missile defense system
to how to build it. 25
Though the subject seemed to fall out of public scrutiny when Clinton
declared a moratorium on testing due to the failures of previous tests,
it was revived again after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
when President Bush himself—against both intelligence and Pentagon
assessments—declared that the attacks proved the need for Star Warstype
nuclear protections (when, in fact, they proved quite the opposite:
the need for better intelligence on the part of the executive branch and
protections against conventional aggressions. Even the U.S. News &
World Report team suggests, “What enemy needs intercontinental ballis-