Bush tries to keep all eyes on the war

By Ron Fournier

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Terrorists by the tens of thousands. Ticking time bombs. An axis of evil. Threats "vastly more deadly" than the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings.

The harrowing images of the past week were designed to rouse Americans from a false sense of security and lay the groundwork for striking back at bases of terrorism, President Bush’s advisers say.

There are other expectations, too: The president hopes to justify his proposed increases in military spending and homeland security, promote the need for a missile defense system, please hawkish conservatives and shift the focus away from political problems at home.

"It’s the right thing to do based on substance, because the threats exist. But it’s also the smart thing to do based on politics," said Antony Blinken, national security adviser in the Clinton White House, which was accused by Republicans of politicizing foreign affairs.

"It keeps people focused on the popular commander in chief and spending less attention on things less comfortable, like the economy and the Enron scandal," Blinken said.

In his State of the Union address, Bush said there were camps in more than a dozen countries that train terrorists — "ticking time bombs, set to go off." He demanded that those nations eliminate the threat.

"If they do not act," Bush warned, "America will."

The president also called Iran, Iraq and North Korea "an axis of evil" that seeks dangerous advantage with weapons of mass destruction. He said he won’t tolerate such ambitions.

Every chance he gets, Bush uses the most expansive interpretation of intelligence data to paint the scariest picture possible.

For example, he said "tens of thousands" of terrorists threaten America, a reference to those trained in Afghanistan since 1979. Advisers said the number was as high as 100,000. A more relevant figure might be 10,000 — the number of al-Qaida terrorists trained in Afghanistan since Osama bin Laden set up his camps there in 1996.

Picking up where Bush left off, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Thursday that the United States faces terrorist surprises "vastly more deadly" than attacks on Washington, D.C., and New York that killed more than 3,000.

In a speech laying out the administration’s justification for requesting a $48 billion budget increase, Rumsfeld also warned that a terrorist country and terrorist group could form an alliance to attack with weapons of mass destruction. That would jeopardize "not thousands of lives, but hundreds of thousands of lives," he said.

In a separate speech, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the United States will work toward international agreements banning the spread of dangerous weapons and ask Russia to push for changes in North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

Those policy prescriptions hardly lived up to Bush’s rhetoric, which North Korea suggested was little short of a declaration of war. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, returning Bush’s verbal fire, called America "the most hated Satan in the world."

Rice did pledge to "move ahead with a missile defense system that can do the job." The line drew huge applause from an audience of conservatives, many of whom are pressuring Bush to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

"I guess you could call all of this a scare campaign, but I think what they’re also trying to do is raise the level of interest back up," said Jay Farrar, a military and political analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "Roosevelt had to do the same thing within six months of the Pearl Harbor attack."

Like Roosevelt and other presidents, Bush is not immune to political pressures in wartime.

"He’s keenly aware of how his father lost momentum after the Persian Gulf War, so I’m sure he’s attuned to how to keep this war alive, both for practical and political reasons," said Farrar, a former Marine colonel.

Analysts say that renewing the focus on terrorism — and a need to increase military spending —helps justify cuts in domestic programs that Bush will propose next week as he grapples with a budget squeeze.

The president is a victim of his own success, said political scientist Stephen Hess. With no new attacks and the war in Afghanistan going well, Americans are starting to become complacent. Bush, for a number a reasons, sought to shake them up.

"He’s got to make his case vividly so we’ll bear with him and be patient — so we’ll accept how much money is being spent, so we’ll stay firmly behind him and stay on guard," said Hess, who works at the Brookings Institution in Washington.