The global press corps in mid-October belatedly discovered the National Space Policy document released by the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy --10 days after EE Times first carried details of the policy on our Web site and a week after military leaders meeting in Omaha discussed the policy in open session. Dollops of righteous indignation were served all around, topped off by an Oct. 21 editorial in The New York Times chiding the policy's unilateralist principles.

The Times was right to point out that the nation often does not abide by the rules it demands others follow, but the Bush administration is right to insist the 2006 policy does not represent that big a change from the Clinton administration. The problem is not that President Bush uses unilateralist terms of reference that have not been encountered before but that unilateralist doctrine has driven certain global policies for decades, while pundits and citizens do their best to ignore the contradictions that arise when other nations confront those policies.

When the last National Space Policy was released in 1996, it was accompanied by a shiny piece of propaganda from the U.S. Space Command, Vision for 2020, which critics later nicknamed the "document of domination." It made clear that the Pentagon's space agencies saw its role as assuring U.S. dominance of all orbital space surrounding the planet. Using military space networks for intelligence and communication as a "force multiplier" implied preserving the economic divide.

And indeed, three years before the document was released, the Clinton administration touted a program called TenCap, the Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities, in which technical intelligence agencies like the National Reconnaissance Office and National Security Agency announced openly that they no longer saw arms-control treaty verification as a mission. Their purpose was to "serve the warfighter."

While Clinton was president, the Washington-based think tanks and nongovernmental organizations that monitor the Pentagon, such as the Center for Defense Information (CDI), made specific critiques of programs like ballistic missile defense, but avoided like the plague any direct analysis of unilateralist doctrine. Some of the reluctance to take on Clinton might have been attributable to the funding on which NGOs rely; some of it may have been due to a fear (perhaps well-founded) that most Americans might favor unilateralism. These groups spoke out against potential weapons in space, but they ignored the misuse of the military networks already out there.

In the aftermath of a war gone bad and an arrogant White House approach to issues like enemy combatants in Guantanamo, Bush administration critics feel comfortable addressing unilateralism directly. CDI, in its critique of the October 2006 Space Policy, made the issue of inherent unilateralism its primary talking point. Welcome to the club.

Just as many military officers believe that the Iraq war was mishandled from the get-go, many in the military do not buy all the implications of a single nation holding both the playbook and the dictionary. For example, Gil Klinger, an executive who has worked in the NRO and National Space Architect's office, talks of "universal rules of the road" to which all space-faring nations must adhere. But these bureaucrats must compete with the continued support in both political parties for Rumsfeld-style "transformationalism."

Despite problems with civilian space missions and significant delays in big-budget military space programs, this nation remains far ahead of any other in its use of space. Indeed, that's what made Donald Rumsfeld's 2001 warning of a "space Pearl Harbor" so silly--we are the only ones likely to inflict a Pearl Harbor on others. But a wise superpower uses dominance to convince, not to dictate, and that is where the National Space Policy fails.

Even without crossing the the Rubicon of space weaponization, most of the nation's military networks in space have been repurposed for unilateralism and tactical warfare. A turn to a more equitable use of orbital space does not imply that any satellite needs to be turned off, or that no satellite system can support a soldier in the field. But it does imply that the U.S. should rethink its unilateralist doctrine of imposing fair-use policies on other nations.

What the press failed to realize in its October tirade over space doctrine is that such unilateralism is much more deeply embedded in both political parties than Bush critics realize.

For once, the president was right in insisting that his message was not that different from Clinton's. The message, however, is still wrong.

By Loring Wirbel (lwirbel@cmp.com), communications editor for EE Times