Iran launched a new North Korean-designed missile last week that will extend the deadly reach of the mullahs to Israel and beyond, as well as threatening thousands of U.S. troops in the Middle East. The North Korean version of the missile has an 800-mile range; Iran's may go slightly farther. Regardless of their precise range, the missiles represent a new strategic threat in the region for which the United States and its allies are ill-prepared and against which, it bears repeating, we are all but defenseless.
With luck, the Iranian launch will serve as the exclamation point on an important report released just a week earlier on ballistic-missile threats to the United States. The report, issued by a commission chaired by former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, not only warns of imminent missile threats of the sort exemplified by Iran's launch last week, but suggests that the Clinton administration has been lax about the threat and that the intelligence community has consistently underestimated missile dangers.
Amid the administration's understandable consternation over Iran's tests last week, the president told reporters, "We're very, very concerned about it, but not surprised by it." This is an unsettling reaction, to say the least. The Clinton administration has back-burnered missile defenses that might be effective against the likes of Iran's new Shahab-3. If the administration is truly not surprised, then it has been derelict in its duty. Still, it's not too late for the president to draw the obvious conclusion from the findings of the Rumsfeld commission: The threat has arrived, and we must redouble efforts to deploy effective missile defenses.