Christopher Ruddy
Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2003

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, NewsMax.com published an interview with Gen. John Singlaub and Adm. Thomas Moorer. Both of these former senior American military commanders issued important warnings for the future of the U.S.

Their first advice was that President Bush should move quickly to military secure the Panama Canal, over which China had been given operational control. Second, Singlaub and Moorer warned that conflict with North Korea was likely in the near future.

As Gen. Singlaub explained to NewsMax in late 2001, he had little doubt that North Korea, headed by madman Kim Jong Il, would seize the opportunity and threaten war if the U.S. got mired down in a Middle Eastern war.

Singlaub’s prediction about North Korea was not a shot in the blue. He had served as chief of staff of U.S. forces in Korea during the 1970s and has carefully monitored Korea since.

Soon after NewsMax’s interview with Moorer and Singlaub appeared, the Pentagon did indeed bolster the United States' naval presence in the Panama Canal, signing a new treaty with the Panamanians.

Now Korea has moved to center stage, just as Singlaub and Moorer predicted.

The Korean threat to the United States today underscores President Bush’s warning that unless we deal with rogue nations now while they are comparatively weak, we will have to deal with them tomorrow when they are much stronger.

However, Bush has also kept talk of a Korean crisis muted. This is smart considering we are about to go to war against Iraq, stretching our military resources.

The last thing we need is a two-front war. After Bill Clinton’s draconian military cuts during the 1990s, a two-front war could prove disastrous.

The Koreans are well aware of our military weakness, and that is why they are now saber-rattling, trying to extort billions of dollars in aid, threatening war on the Korean peninsula, and even suggesting that they may use nuclear weapons.

By all accounts, they already have several nuclear weapons and could have more soon. But if that makes them difficult to deal with now, just imagine how difficult it would be to deal with them once they have dozens of nuclear weapons and advanced missiles. They could even have nuclear-armed missiles capable of hitting the continental United States in the next five years.

Picture the current Korean crisis with San Francisco and Los Angeles in the cross hairs. Now you understand why missile defense is vital.

The bottom line: We must deal with Iraq, North Korea and other countries that threaten the United States before it is too late.

Does that mean the U.S. should go to war with these nations?

Only as a last resort. Instead, the U.S. should use its enormous economic and political power to stop, hinder and change rogue nations.

In addition, well-funded and determined U.S. intelligence services, something that was severely corroded during the Clinton years, could help to make the world a safer by taking the proactive steps that make war unnecessary.

But we must move quickly, even when it is difficult for the public to understand why.

Most people don’t appreciate that time is a precious commodity, disappearing before our eyes. But if we do not act while we can from a position of strength in a world where dozens of hostile nations now seek weapons of mass destruction, there may be no second chance for us.

This theme is reinforced by several distinguished writers in the March issue of NewsMax Magazine:

Max Freedman offers a penetrating review of a new book that interestingly illustrates my point about not waiting to act.

In his penetrating biography of the famous educator and psychologist, “Rising to the Light: A Portrait of Bruno Bettelheim,” Theron Raines details Bettelheim’s years in Austria, as the Nazis took power and Jews were systematically plundered and sent to the concentration camps.

Bettelheim ended up in Buchenwald and Dachau, like millions of other Jews. Later he admitted that he saw all the warning signs about the Nazis and their imminent danger, yet he and most people did not take decisive action.

Fortunately, Bettelheim was released from Buchenwald shortly before the outbreak of World War II and was able to immigrate to the United States, where he became a leading child educator in Chicago.

Raines writes of Bettelheim “in his usual way he wrote to teach, to warn his readers once more that carrying on a normal life ‘can be fatal in extreme circumstances.’ In the world he know, those who glorified a passive response to oppression were dangerously out of touch with reality; he also believed that cultural attitudes in part led to the inertia that kept ghetto Jews from trying to defend themselves against the Nazis ...”

Bettelheim’s biography makes it clear that we cannot live in the past when our society is under siege. We cannot afford the fantasy believing there is any guarantee the future will be as pleasant as the past, if we simply close our eyes to reality.

Indeed, after Sept. 11, we all live in a new world that demands from each of us greater responsibility, greater awareness, and more forceful action to stop the new evils which threaten us all.

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