As the Soviet Union seemed to rush toward democracy, the timing of President Bush`s cross-country military tour looked baffling, at best.
But as Bush donned first desert camouflage to watch war games in the Mojave Desert Tuesday and then a brown bomber jacket to climb into the cockpit of a B1-B bomber Thursday in Omaha, he was focused not so much on the men wearing gray fedoras in the Kremlin but on a different, more immediate adversary: Congress.
”I know we`re in for a war up on Capitol Hill,” Bush said Thursday after spending three days on a rigorous rear-guard action west of the Potomac, pitching at each stop on a tour the idea that the United States must maintain a healthy $295 billion defense budget.
The parading of the hardware of war as the president looked on was out of sync with the public message coming from the East bloc, and the momentous political changes unfolding in the Soviet Union seemed almost a distraction for Bush.
Secretary of State James A. Baker III was in Moscow on Thursday talking with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze about the strategic arms treaty that both nations want to complete by the next superpower summit in June.
But Bush said he doesn`t want the Soviet changes to ”lull us into a sense of complacency.” Defending the timing of his trip, Bush said he was sending ”a clear message that I am behind a sensible defense program.”
The president, worried that he would look militaristic in contrast to the Soviets, asserted that his message was one of ”stability, of reasonableness.” He also declared that ”no sane man or woman is nostalgic for the Cold War.”
”I`m not going to miss an opportunity in arms control,” he said as he flew back to Washington Thursday night, ”but we`re going to keep a strong defense. And I think that`s a stabilizing message, not a militant message.”
As President Bush bounded from the desert tank battles to underground bunkers and squeezed into the cockpit of the B-1B this week, he provided news cameras with plenty of robust, man-at-war images.
Although the president gleefully talked about his new ”Macho Man”
image, he insisted that his brand of caution was essential in managing the military.
”We`ve got to do our cutting with a scalpel, not a meat ax,” he warned at a Republican fundraising dinner in Ohio Thursday. Two nights earlier in Los Angeles, Bush seemed almost plaintive as he said: ”I`m in a big battle with Congress, and I`d like to have your support to keep reasonable levels of defense.”
Bush`s tour emphasized that the two high-tech programs-the ”Star Wars”
missile defense ($4.8 billion proposed for 1991) and the B-2 Stealth bomber
($524 million each)-are most vulnerable to those who want to see a ”peace dividend” and want to see it now.
Bush also suggested that he wanted to preserve some of the military hardware simply as bargaining chips.
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”I`m not going to miss an opportunity to cut, but I want to do it prudently,” he said, ”and I want to get something from the other side when we do it.”
On Thursday, however, House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.)
accused Bush of seeking a strategic treaty that would force Congress ”to fund a B-2 bomber we do not need, writing a budget for strategic defenses that will not work, demanding outdated missiles for a threat on yesterday`s horizon.”
Democrats believe they can slice another $4 billion to $7 billion out of the defense budget and apply it to domestic programs.
”It`s a hard sell,” Steven Guerrier, a professor at James Madison University in Virginia who has edited two books on strategic defense and Star Wars, said of Bush`s initiative. ”There`s a perceived sense that Americans want to see the defense budget cut rapidly.”
Whatever the president does, said Guerrier, the demand for deep defense cuts will escalate quickly if the East-West tension continues to diminish.
”People will begin to ask,” he predicts, ”how many school lunches do you get for an aircraft carrier group?”
Despite its megakill purpose, the military command is part of the trappings of the presidency. Bush looked pleased in the B-1B and then sitting at the console looking at huge wall-mounted television screens in a bunker 40 feet underneath Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha.
”We still live in a time of uncertainty,” Bush told SAC commanders and troops. ”So as we push for a major new arms agreement with the Soviets, to increase stability we will continue to modernize strategic forces.”
Bush opened his SAC talk with words from every Doomsday movie ever made:
”This is the president speaking. . . .”
He seemed to dispel the mood, however, when he signed off, telling the missile crews to remember that ”the pointy end is up.”