RUST COMMENTARY: THREAT OF MISSILE ATTACK ON THE U.S. IS STILL VERY REAL

I reported recently on a speech by U.S. Sen. PAT MOYNIHAN (D-N.Y.) to major newspaper executives at their annual convention this April.

In his remarks he focused completely on the nuclear threat to this country and the world, a subject little discussed in the last three to five years.

The following is an excerpt from the July 16 Wall Street Journal editorial headed ZERO WARNING:

"You can tell the world is calm when the biggest summer scare that Hollywood can conjure is an asteroid beheading the Chrysler Building. Maybe that's because our political leaders haven't been honest about the much more real, and immediate, threat of a ballistic missile attack on Manhattan.

"Or Chicago. Or San Francisco. Or anywhere else in a continental U.S. whose citizens have come to believe they are sheltered from enemy attack. Yesterday a bipartisan panel of defense strategists released a unanimous report that ought to jolt both politicians and the public.

"America's intelligence community has routinely judged the ballistic missile threat to be at least 10 to 15 years away -- time enough to come up with a defense. But `this is not a distant threat,' counters the report issued by `Team B,' a commission established by Congress to offer a second opinion. Iran, North Korea and other hostile nations are now able to `acquire the means to strike the U.S. within about five years of a decision' to build such a weapon.

"Even more worrisome, assorted new `means of delivery can shorten the warning time of deployment nearly to zero.' In other words, we may not know about an enemy missile armed with a nuclear or biological warhead until it is already descending on city hall.

"The commission says U.S. analysts have made the mistake of judging new missile threats by Cold War assumptions. The U.S. and Russia pursued their missile plans in fairly predictable ways -- development, flight tests, deployment. But your average Saddam Hussein doesn't care about the same standards. All he wants is a terror weapon to throw destruction at a target. Even the threat of its use might deter American action against him. It's no accident, the report says, that a Chinese general remarked amid the 1996 Taiwan crisis that the Americans probably didn't want to trade Los Angeles for Taipei.

"Emerging missile powers also have the benefit of technology that is quickly and easily spread. Russian technicians are for sale. China has sold complete missile systems to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

"New missile powers also have access to technology -- for example, the means to quickly dig underground tunnels -- that can disguise the speed of their weapons development. Sometimes this is even our fault: It was the U.S. that let India in on the means we use to detect nuclear tests, so India disguised its plans in ways that foiled those means.

"And once a missile is built, U.S. enemies have new ways to deliver it. Americans tend to think we're only threatened by an ICBM launched from someone's homeland. But even an enemy without that capability could hide shorter-range missiles on a commercial ship, sail it to U.S. waters, and start the first bombardment of American shores since Fort Sumter.

"The report is all the more striking because it is the unanimous view of a politically diverse commission. It's led by former GOP defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But its members include former Clinton CIA director Jim Woolsey and veteran Democratic arms-controllers Barry Blechman and Richard Garwin. As notable is the assent of retired Air Force Gen. Lee Butler, former head of the Strategic Air Command, who underwent a very public post-service revulsion against America's nuclear strategy. The commission worked for six months and had ready access to U.S. intelligence.

"With this kind of credibility, we'd like to think the report would awaken Team Clinton from its missile denial. But the early word is that it will instead quietly trash the report as alarmist and politically motivated. This would fit the Clinton pattern of sacrificing long-run security for short-run political convenience.

"A complacent public may not signal support for any of this in opinion polls. But someone has to tell them, with the Rumsfeld Commission, that a missile attack on America is much more likely than they know."

My complaints about PRESIDENT CLINTON go much beyond the character issue to his actions and inactions on many crucial issues facing the United States and the world.

No good athlete is judged by his appearance and talk but rather by his performance. So should we be judging the president.

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Every man is valued in this world as he shows by his conduct that he wishes to be valued. -- Jean De La Bruyere.

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In a speech given at HILLSDALE COLLEGE in Michigan recently by MARIANNE JENNINGS (a university professor from Arizona), she made some of the following observations:

"If you think about it, college freshmen today were born in 1979, which puts them after Vietnam, after Richard Nixon and Watergate. They never saw Sam Ervin's eyebrows. Can you imagine that would not be something that would be familiar to them? They were also born even after `Saturday Night Fever' -- they didn't know John Travolta had a first career before the second career. They have not known marriage as the predominant institution in society. They are more than likely, with the divorce rate what it is, to have come from a broken home. These are the children of child care -- 67 percent of them had mothers who worked outside the home while they were young. They are the children of our country's most materialistic generation, mine, the baby boomers. They do know a lot about Madonna, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Michael Tyson, and G.I. Jane. Those are some of their role models.

"This is an interesting statistic: Nearly 100 percent of them can name the Three Stooges, but not one of them can name three justices on the Supreme Court. It's reassuring 73 percent of them want to start their own businesses. And 53 percent of them voted for Bill Clinton, which I find a little bit inconsistent there. They voted for Bill Clinton but want to start their own businesses. Only 27 percent would have attended church in the last seven days. Their heroes would include the ones I listed earlier, and only 1 percent would name a member of the clergy as a hero.

"That's a little bit of background about the real generation gap. As I look at students in the classroom, I believe that they have three voids that they come to us with, and these voids do not mean that we have a very bright future ahead unless we can fix it, and I have some ideas on that. First there is an education void, then there's a work ethic void, then there's a moral void. I'll talk about them in that order. Let me talk about the education void.

"Ninety percent of the students entering the Cal State University system had to take some form of remedial course work in English or math or something like that. Recently in the New York Times, Rudolph Guiliani was, of course, criticized for this, but he discovered that 87 percent of the students entering New York's community colleges flunk the placement test. In other words, they can't even pass the test that would put them into remedial course work. This is something else that he discovered: If skills were a determinant for entrance into the New York system of higher education, three of every four students currently applying would be denied admission. It is a government program, so they let them all in anyway. Guiliani's point is: Well, we have a lot of remedial course work, and we need to do something with it.

"The United States ranked 28 out of 42 nations on the last international math study. The SATs run a steady decline. Don't let anybody fool you about that. Despite the 35-point adjustment upward, our SAT scores have only risen three points in the last 30 years. I find this interesting when you couple that with the fact that 37 percent of all high school graduates have a straight-A average. I have to tell you that I have watched in horror as my own children have progressed through the school system. As a parent, you make mistakes. Not the same ones as my parents. I'm reinventing the wheel, I'm making all new ones, but one of the mistakes I made was that I put my child, my oldest, into public schools. Of course, when they're getting straight A's, your tendency is to believe that you've raised a genius. What you don't understand is that you've raised someone who understands how to play the system at public school. When she went into algebra in eighth grade, we were sitting at the table one evening, and she asked for help with a problem. We were computing it, and I said it's 10 percent of 470, and she reached for her calculator to compute 10 percent of 470, and then we were progressing and working through another problem, and I said your answer is one-fourth or 25 percent, and she said, "How did you get the 25 percent?" So I watched in horror as my own flesh and blood sat before me and I realized how little she knew despite straight A's, and I said, `Are the other kids this dumb?' She said without missing a beat, `Oh, they're much dumber!'"

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Have you ever wondered just how big the education bureaucracy is in Washington, D.C.? A congressional report issued last Thursday identified 760 separate programs run by 39 different federal agencies at a cost of $100 billion a year. Most of these programs are not at the Department of Education but are spread throughout the bureaucracy.

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The next time you hear that this nation is becoming a nation of part-timers, just recognize that in recent meetings of the seven biggest economies, the U.S. was the only one where the percentage of part-time workers, as a share of total employment, was actually smaller than in the 1980s.

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IN CONFIDENTIAL 27-page memo, FBI director warned Reno: FBI director Louis Freeh forcefully warned Attorney General Reno that she was flatly misreading the law by not seeking an independent counsel to investigate campaign fund raising by the Clinton administration, the NEW YORK TIMES reported last week.

Freeh wrote Reno a 27-page memorandum in November 1997 urging her to bring in outside counsel.

Reno told the Senate last Wednesday that her exchange with Freeh was confidential, but Governmental Affairs chairman Fred Thompson of Tennessee quoted Freeh: "It is difficult to imagine a more compelling situation for appointing an independent counsel. ... It's a conflict for the attorney general to investigate her superiors." Reno expressed surprise when Thompson went public with details of the private feud.

Freeh said that the FBI's investigation had led them to the highest levels of the White House including the vice president and the president, and therefore the Department of Justice must look at the Independent Counsel Statue, revealed Thompson.

On June 19 the FBI general counsel briefed Sens. Fred Thompson and John Glenn in detail on the contents of Freeh's warning.

Reno told Senate Judiciary Committee's Arlen Specter on Wednesday that she was prepared to take his questions about Chinese penetration of the White House, via campaign cash, "until hell freezes over."

"Freeh has been worried all along that secret intelligence gathered by the Bureau and the National Security Agency would make its way back to the top White House policy makers close to the Chinese operatives and most interested in shutting down the investigation," writes Op-Ed "Uncle" Bill Safire in a companion editorial last Thursday.

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Congratulation to Airport Director BRUCE LOY and all involved for the highly successful air show recently. We had some of the finest here.

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Monday-morning quarterbacks: If you really want to give me advice, do it on Saturday afternoon between 1 and 4 o'clock, when you've got 25 seconds to do it, between plays. Don't give me advice on Monday. I know the right thing to do on Monday." -- Alex Agase, college football coach.

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