RUST COMMENTARY: INDIA CATCHES CIA OFF GUARD

The Bomb: India's detonation of five nuclear devices in the desert near Pakistan was a rude reminder that the world is a dangerous place. The largest blast was at least twice as big as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima.

The blast caught the CIA totally by surprise. Why? Have deep cuts in U.S. intelligence services curtailed our ability to know what is going on around the world? Japan, Australia and New Zealand all condemned the tests and said they planned to call their ambassadors home in protest. The Indian tests will spur Pakistan to show it has nuclear capabilities and China will have an excuse to step up its own military build-up. The bottom line is this: U.S. foreign policy is in shambles, our military has been cut too much, and American families remain completely vulnerable to a missile attack because we have not deployed a defense system. -- American Renewal

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The most dangerous addict: Why we need to destroy Saddam Hussein's ability to terrorize the world: Someone who should know Saddam Hussein, Syria's dictator Hafez Assad, said that Saddam is like a chain smoker, lighting another cigarette before he has finished the first. But Saddam's addiction is not nicotine. It is bloodshed. Saddam's flat eyes and eerily calm demeanor reveal nothing, but the drumbeat of war from him speaks insistently of his evil intent. Here is a man who used poison gas on Iranians and nerve gas on his own people. He invaded Iran in 1980. He began the gulf tanker war in 1984. The next year he bombed and rocketed Iran's cities. He stopped firing at Iran in 1988 but hardly paused for breath before invading Kuwait in 1990. He suppressed the postwar popular uprising in his own country. He resumed the slaughter of Shitites and Kurds. The list goes on and on.

Our reaction to this catalog of crime has lost effectiveness. The United Nations condemns him. The United States threatens and sometimes even takes nominal military actions against him. Then Iraq backs down, militarily unharmed and politically strengthened, and the shell game goes on.

Killing fields: The defection of Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, in 1995 revealed what is at stake. Kamel supervised Iraq's unconventional-weapons programs, and he disclosed that Saddam's most lethal poisons survived the war. Weapons bearing anthrax and botulinum toxin have been created. Iraq has thousands of liters of anthrax -- inhalation of one-ninth of a millionth of a gram is usually fatal. It is also known that Baghdad had stockpiled four tons of VX, a nerve agent that can kill when one-hundredth of a gram is ingested. Saddam retains the ability to produce more of these toxins and can put them on missiles that put hundreds of thousands of people in the war zone at risk. We too are threatened. Anthrax can be smuggled here in a suitcase.

An outlaw who has killed his own people cannot be given the benefit of a nanosecond of doubt. Our satellite surveillance makes clear the presence of piles of biological and chemical weapons within the 60 square miles of land around many of the presidential palaces that Saddam had placed off limits to U.N. inspectors.

Force is the only language Saddam understands. It must be effective force that deters him and the Saddam wannabes in the region. Iran, for all its supposed friendly overtures, is set on developing by late next year nuclear and chemical weapons, and missiles capable of delivering them 1,300 kilometers.

Russia and France favor diplomacy over force. So would everyone -- but not the kind of diplomacy that amounts to a sellout. We cannot allow the U.N. Security Council to endorse that, even if members are under pressure from the Russians, who are playing political games. Saddam must be made to comply with the U.N. resolutions to destroy all weapons of mass destruction and the means to make them. A fake "diplomatic" victory would be a betrayal. Let's remember Margaret Thatcher's admonition to President Bush when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990: "This is no time to go wobbly." We cannot live with a mass murderer just days away from creating a new arsenal.

The issue with Iraq goes beyond Saddam's failure to honor his promises. Civilized nations do not wish to live in a world threatened by weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. Since World War II, we have pursued this goal through a mosaic of treaties: the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention. And to waver now would be to question the credibility of the entire effort.

Like President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, President Clinton must be prepared to use surveillance photography and other evidence to demonstrate to Americans the need for action. He must take the matches away from the world's most dangerous addict. -- Mortimer Zuckerman, U.S. News & World Report

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Will America Be Caught in Clinton's Web? President Bill Clinton made a major speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22, 1997, in which he set forth his hopes for the future. It didn't get much ink then, but it's very important in explaining his world view and how his various foreign policy initiatives mesh together into a consistent plan.

Clinton used the metaphor "web," and it is very apt. He described the series of treaties he has signed and sent to the U.S. Senate for ratification as a "web of institutions and arrangements" that has set "the international ground rules for the 21st century," and he urged Americans to support what he called "the emerging international system."

Clinton enthusiastically described the treaties which are locking the United States into a network of global entanglements: the World Trade Organization, the Chemical Weapons Convention, "binding international commitments to protect the environment" (i.e., the Global Warming Treaty) and the NATO Expansion Treaty.

Since Clinton's speech, this rosy picture has been somewhat tarnished. The WTO decision against Eastman Kodak was followed by a layoff of 16,000 employees, people are asking why the Chemical Weapons Treaty doesn't protect us against Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons, and the Global Warming Treaty is being ridiculed as hot air.

In his U.N. speech, Clinton spoke with gusto about what he called "this new global era." He said, "The forces of global integration are a great tide, inexorably wearing away the established order of things. But we must decide what will be left in its wake."

All of a sudden it appears that the "established order of things" being washed away is our right to decide how to spend American tax dollars. According to Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, global integration requires us to spend tens of billions of U.S. dollars to bail out the bad loans made by the big U.S. banks to corrupt Asian regimes.

"Before the century ends," Clinton told the U.N., "we should establish a permanent international court to prosecute the most serious violations of humanitarian law." That means that Clinton's "web" includes a global court empowered to invent and adjudicate a new system of "humanitarian law" made by persons unknown.

"The United Nations must play a leading role in this effort," Clinton said, "filling in the fault lines of the new global era." He defined the U.N. mission as taking over peace, security, human rights, eliminating poverty, and "sustainable development" (the code word for global control of energy consumption).

Clinton concluded his U.N. speech by telling us that it is "necessary to imagine a future that is different from the past, necessary to free ourselves from destructive patterns of relations with each other and within our own nations and live a future that is different from the past." He didn't define what will be "different" about our future, but it is clear from the text and tone of the entire speech that the principal difference will be submerging what he called our "poisoned nationalism" into a "web" of global organizations.

Exploring Clinton's mind further, let's look at his remarks made the following month, on Oct. 17, 1997, in Buenos Aires to Argentine reporters. "What I'm trying to do is to promote a process of reorganization of the world so that human beings are organized in a way that takes advantage of the new opportunities of this era." -- Phyllis Schlafly Report

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.