While the Left and their handmaidens in the media paint pictures of Republicans dumping arsenic in our water, there is Bill S.149 before Congress which could result in a much quicker death for all of us than arsenic poisoning. The Export Administration Act is the baby of Senators Phil Gramm and Mike Enzi, of Texas and Wyoming respectively.

    Little "sensitive" military technology remains after eight years of Clinton fire sales to China, North Korea and Russia. In "Sold Into Slavery," a 35-page article, I documented the policy and the technology that went West. The so-called "engagement" policy came out of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Arms Controls, where our superior military technology was viewed as a "wasting asset," and, therefore, strategic controls should be lifted in order to share the technology with friendly foreign countries. Evidently the Stanford Center had never asked the Dalai Lama to speak there, because he could have told them how very friendly the Chinese can be.

    William Perry was Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering during the Carter Administration. During the 80’s and 90’s, he made several trips to China, developing what would prove to be a lucrative friendship with Lieutenant General Ding Henggao, head of COSTIND, which had made "an atomic bomb, an hydrogen bomb, ICBMs, and submarine missiles," according to China Daily, Beijing’s leading paper.

    In October 1994, Ding and Perry were the leading lights in the U.S.-China Defense Conversion Committee, the purpose of which was to convert China’s bloated, obsolescent, and largely inefficient military into a more modern, highly-technological fighting machine, for which Clinton’s 1996 defense budget included a $50 million appropriation. Can you imagine Roosevelt or Churchill arming Hitler with a Congressional appropriation?

    Critical to understanding the folly of this approach, however, is that Perry and Clinton’s approach was the same as that of the Left during the Cold War. If we disarmed unilaterally, then Russia would have nothing to fear from us and would have no reason to expand further its military might. But from time immemorial, those who have followed this anti-logic have become slaves. In the last century, we have the evidence of 100 million dead at the hands of the Left as documented in The Black Book of Communism.

    Devotees of the engagement policy purport to believe that money made in trade prevents murder. However, I believe that this is a deceptively evil rationalization, and that these persons are only concerned with lining their own pockets, whether they be in our federal government, or the heads of corporations trading armaments with China.

    Indeed, students of history know that such policy has not worked in the past murderous century. Socialists in pre-WWI England were all agog over Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, which viewed defense spending—as do Democrats today—as pure folly, liable to arouse distrust in other nations. Angell said that political and military power had become so dependent upon international banking for trade and industrial development that they could do nothing without its sanction. Hitler’s "Third Way" between private ownership of business and socialism, in the form of National Socialism, put the lie to that myth.

    Nevertheless, Hitler had already occupied the Rhineland, Austria, and part of Czechslovakia when Neville Chamberlin directed the Bank of England to extend low interest loans to the Bank of Berlin as a way of furthering trade and preventing war. However, as the Chinese say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and in The Weekly Standard (6/5/00) there is a cartoon of two Chinese walking the Great Wall and one says to the other "I favor a trade partnership with the U.S. It is the only way to get them to adopt repressive, anti-democratic principles."

    The result of the Clinton-Perry engagement with China has turned into the rape of American security. Thanks to Bernie Schwartz of Loral Corporation (the largest private donor to Clinton’s election campaign) and many others, China made a Great Leap, some say of thirty years, in military modernization, with ICBMs now targeting Washington, New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The evidence presented by Bill Gertz, Kenneth Timmerman, Edward Timperlake, William Triplett and others, makes it clear that China means to wage war on us, if not this year in a confrontation over Taiwan, then sometime in the future. Make no mistake, weapons given to the Chinese as a result of this "business-as-usual" engagement policy will kill Americans, and those who were the architects of the policy, and those who implemented it will have blood on their hands.

    A moral equivalence is to be found in the tragedy of Joe Keller, protagonist of Arthur Miller’s play, All My Sons, which opened on Broadway on January 29, 1947, and ran for 328 performances. In WWII, Joe Keller manufactured fighter aircraft engines, and once knowingly shipped out defective engines. Confronted by his son Chris, he resorts to the same kind of rationalization as those who today defend "engagement."

KELLER: You’re a boy—what could I do? I’m in business, a man is in business; one hundred and twenty-one cracked, you’re out of business; you got to process, the process don’t work, you’re out of business; you don’t know how to operate, your stuff is no good; they close you up, they tear up your contracts, what the hell’s it to them? . . . . I never thought they’d install them. I swear to God. I thought they’d stop ‘em before anybody took off.

    When Keller’s other son, a pilot in the Air Force, learns of his father’s guilt, he writes a letter to his girlfriend: "I’m going out on a mission in a few minutes. They’ll probably report me missing. If they do, I want you to know that you mustn’t wait for me." Evidently he crashes his plane. Finally, his father faces his responsibility for the deaths he caused:

KELLER (indicating the letter) What is this if it isn’t telling me? Sure, he was my son. But I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, kid. . . I guess they were.

1His son Chris is acutely aware of the truly universal moral implications of his father’s deed, and that he must pay for it by going to prison, but his mother intercedes:

MOTHER: The war is over, didn’t you hear? It’s over!

CHRIS: Then what was Larry to you, a stone that fell into the water? It’s not enough to be sorry. Larry didn’t kill himself so you and Dad would be "sorry"!

MOTHER: What more can we be?

CHRIS: (with all his power, beyond all restraint) You can be better! Once and for all, you can know now that the whole earth comes in through those fences; there’s a universe outside and you’re responsible to it, and if you’re not, you threw your son away, because that’s why he died! He’s got to go, and I’m . . .

[A shot is heard from the house. They leap in shock.]

    At the beginning of this article I asked, "Have All My Sons gone mad?"

   Lenin said with much cynicism, and yet much foresight, that the bourgeoisie would sell to the Communists the rope that would hang them. And Marx observed that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The Clinton-Perry tragedy of arming a nation that declared it would destroy us is about to be repeated in Congress by the farce of Gramm’s Export Administration Act, whereby the Commerce Secretary is required to decontrol the export of any item that may be available in volume in the country that produces it. Furthermore, Commerce must decontrol any technology that "controlled" countries may buy from dealers outside of the U.S.

    S.149 is the son of another Frankenstein, S.172, introduced by Mr. Gramm in the last Congress, and fortunately defeated. In an article in the Los Angeles Times, Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control noted that many of the components that make a nuclear weapon deadly are readily available in volume in the U.S., but if S.149 passes, countries that have not yet built a bomb would be able to do so by acquiring, for example, maraging steel necessary for the construction of centrifuges, carbon fibers for ICBM nose cones, and high tech switches that can trigger nuclear weapons. Although under Clinton the U.S. armed China on the pretext that it was a friendly trading partner, we have at least had some semblance of a hard line against proliferation of nuclear weapons. S.149 makes a farce of that policy, providing even terrorist countries with a veritable shopping list. Take the example of the German companies who readily sold chemicals and equipment for chemical warfare to Iran and Libya. The provisions of S.149 say that since Iran and Libya can get the materials from Germany, American firms should be able to compete in that lethal market.

    The Wisconsin Project Web site ( www.wisconsinproject.org ) serves the valuable function of monitoring what American technology is available to foreign countries, and the security ramifications thereof. The home page states that they carry out "research and public education designed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. The project has been investigating transfers of nuclear and missile-related technology since 1986 and has identified over 2,000 companies and projects linked to proliferation. By listing suspect buyers in sensitive emerging markets, its data base—the Risk Report—helps exporters and governments keep dangerous products out of the wrong hands."

    I would suggest that all my readers visit the Wisconsin Project site and access the information there. One such article by Milhollin reveals the folly of providing high-performance computers to nations that will use them for manufacturing weapons or more deadly hydrogen bombs. For example, he notes that in January of 2000, Clinton "lowered export controls that had blocked scores of high-performance computers from being shipped to nuclear and missile programs in countries including China, India, and Russia." Documenting the danger in these potential sales, he states that such computers "aren’t like most other exports—they’re more like weapons," because they are necessary for the development of the software and hardware for nuclear and missile programs.

    However, unless all my sons have indeed gone mad, it is reasonable to assume we should not sell the Communists the rope that hangs us.. Only 4 percent of applications for exports of dual-use technology are denied. Writing in March 2000, Milhollin stated,

   It is time for the administration to understand that there is more to foreign policy than promoting trade. It is easier, safer and more economical to stop dangerous exports than to defend against the weapons they produce. The revenue isn’t worth the risk. And it is time for the computer industry, which sees itself as forever young, to grow up and accept responsibility for the nation’s security.

   My first reaction was that even if Bill S.149 passed, President Bush would veto it. No advocate of Clintonian engagement he, or so I thought. In a 3/28/01 meeting with "high-tech leaders," the President stated, "The existing export controls forbid the sales abroad of computers with more than a certain amount of computing power. With computing power doubling every 18 months, these controls had the shelf life of sliced bread. They don’t work." Bush then thanked Senator Gramm for S.149, which will "give our industry an equal chance in world markets." He concluded by saying, "I urge the Senate to pass it quickly."