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Bush, on campaign trail, touts missile defense plan

US President George W. Bush speaks at a campaign rally in Hedgesville, West Virginia, Tuesady. PHOTO: REUTERS

Saying he was "living in the future," President Bush promoted his plans for a missile defense system on Tuesday and said that its opponents were putting the nation's security at risk, as he courted aerospace workers in Pennsylvania before rallying supporters in West Virginia.

"We say to those tyrants who believe they can blackmail America and the free world, `You fire, we're going to shoot it down,'" Bush told Boeing employees in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, south of Philadelphia.

"I think those who oppose this ballistic missile system really don't understand the threats of the 21st century," Bush said. "They're living in the past. We're living in the future. We're going to do what's necessary to protect this country."

Bush did not mention his challenger, Senator John Kerry, by name. Kerry has called for diverting money from developing the missile-defense system, which Democrats say is untested, to pay for expanding the military by 40,000 troops.

The president noted that Boeing engineers helped load the first ground-based missile interceptor into a silo in Alaska last month and called that "the beginning of a missile-defense system that was envisioned by Ronald Reagan."

The administration's plans, which rely on ground-based rockets, are sharply scaled down from the space-based shield envisioned by Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and derided in the 1980s as a "Star Wars" system.

Rand Beers, a national security adviser to Kerry, said Bush's "near obsession" with missile defense preoccupied the administration in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Beers said that Kerry believed that an "effective" missile defense was "crucial to our national security strategy," but that he "also understands the importance of facing our most pressing national security threats while continuing to develop and deploy a national missile defense which we know will work."

Bush's trip wrapped up here in eastern West Virginia, near Martinsburg, with a rally before several thousand supporters who did not quite fill a high school football field.

Pennsylvania, which Bush lost by 2 percentage points to Al Gore in 2000, and West Virginia, which he won by 6, are crucial battlegrounds in the election.

Both states have been hit hard by job losses, and the presidential race is neck and neck in both, with Kerry showing slight leads in some recent polls.

The visit to a Boeing plant was Bush's second in five days. On Friday, in Seattle, he said the US would go to the World Trade Organization if necessary to block European subsidies to Airbus, the leading Boeing competitor.

Kerry has said for more than a year that the federal government should subsidize Boeing in response, and his aides accused Bush on Tuesday of doing "too little too late."

The people who crowded into a factory parking lot were all invited, but it would have doubtless been a friendly crowd in any case. Boeing and its employees have given almost US$60,000 to Bush this election year, more than double what they have given to Kerry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign financing.
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