Bush and Quayle Team Up to Boost Home-Front Morale : President: An angry chief executive seeks to focus the nation’s attention on what he calls ‘the savagery of Saddam.’

President Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle opened a coordinated campaign Wednesday to bolster home-front morale and focus the nation’s attention on what Bush called “the savagery of Saddam.”

Delivering his first speech since the United States and allied forces unleashed their massive attack on Iraq, and choosing an organization of military reservists as his audience, the President turned the war against Iraq into a war against one man--Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

“No one should weep for this tyrant when he is brought to justice,” Bush said. “No one--anywhere in the world.” He was not specific about the form justice would take.

Earlier, Quayle delivered a pep talk to enthusiastic crowds, mostly military dependents, and met with relatives of several missing or captured Americans as he hopscotched up the East Coast. The meetings “were quite tearful on both sides,” Quayle said after returning to Washington on Air Force Two.

The wife of one missing flier read to him parts of a letter she had received from her husband a few weeks before the war began, expressing his conviction that “he was doing the right thing,” Quayle reported.

In his speech to the annual dinner of the Reserve Officers Assn., Bush called Iraq’s televised display of POWs “one more proof of the savagery of Saddam.” The prisoners’ statements denouncing the Persian Gulf War were “false words, forced on them by their captors,” he said.

“Saddam has sickened the world with his use of Scud missiles--those inaccurate bombs that indiscriminately strike at cities and innocent civilians in both Israel and Saudi Arabia,” he added. “These weapons are nothing more than tools of terror, and they do nothing but strengthen our resolve to act against a dictator unmoved by human decency.”

In what aides said was a speech Bush wrote himself, the President said that “all life is precious, whether it’s the life of an American pilot or an Iraqi child. Yet if life is precious, so too are the living principles of liberty and peace.” He said the Iraqi president “has brought war upon himself.”

Quayle, meanwhile, traveled from Mayport Naval Station in Florida to Pope Air Base in North Carolina, and then to the massive naval facilities in Norfolk, Va. At each of his stops, he was met by a classic scene of the home front of war: crowds made up primarily of military wives, many with small children, and flags, photographs and placards bearing the names of military units deployed to the gulf.

Gathered in vast airplane hangars, the women cheered and the children played with toys on the concrete floors as Quayle complimented the units now engaged in combat.

“It is not technology, however advanced, or weapons, however smart, that keep our country great,” Quayle said in the speech that he repeated at each of his three stops. “It is the men and women of the armed forces who do the most important work of all.”

Quoting from Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Quayle assured his audiences that the nation remained united behind the efforts of their soldiers and appreciated, as well, the sacrifices of those who remained behind.

“All of you have made an enormous sacrifice for your country,” he said. “You, too, are serving our country with distinction.”

Although references to the units overseas repeatedly brought applause, some of the loudest cheers came for the chief technological hero of the war so far--the Scud-downing Patriot anti-missile missile system.

Quayle’s staff has been busy distributing to reporters copies of a story from the Des Moines Register that credits the vice president with having had a major role, when he was a senator, in securing money to upgrade the Patriot for use as a defensive shield.

Quayle, a long-time backer of “Star Wars” space-based defensive systems, used the success of the Patriot as an example of how well ballistic-missile defenses can work. “Many of its critics said it would not work,” he said. “Watch CNN--it does work.”

The vice president also took the opportunity of addressing a pro-military audience to criticize the press for overcovering anti-war demonstrations. “The media seem compelled to devote much more attention” to the protests “than they deserve,” Quayle said.

In Mayport, Quayle met with the wife and two young children of Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher, pilot of the U.S. Navy F-18C who was the first American shot down and believed killed in the war.

He also met with the brother of Marine Corps Chief Warrant Officer Guy L. Hunter, of Camp Pendleton, one of the crew of a Marine OV-10 Bronco shot down over Iraq on Saturday and captured by the Iraqis.

At Norfolk, Quayle met with the wife of Lawrence Slade and the fiance of Navy Lt. Robert Wetzel. Slade, a radar officer on a Navy F-14, was shot down Monday over Iraq. His partner was rescued by U.S. helicopters later that day. Wetzel’s A-6 was shot down Friday. His partner, Navy Lt. Jeffrey N. Zaun, has been identified by Iraq as a captive.

Military officials did not allow reporters to talk with the family members, to protect their privacy. But Quayle later provided brief descriptions of the sessions.

“I was struck by a couple of the women that were exceedingly tough and enduring in a very difficult situation,” he said.

Bush, who was interrupted by applause several times as he spoke to the reserve officers group, said the war did not begin with the United States-led attack on Iraq. Rather, he said, it began with Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2.

“Turning a blind eye to Saddam’s aggression would not have avoided war--it would only have delayed the world’s day of reckoning, postponing what would ultimately have been a far more dangerous and a far more costly conflict,” the President said.

“What was, and is, at stake is not simply our energy and economic security, and the stability of a vital region, but the prospects for peace in the post-Cold War era,” Bush said.

Gerstenzang reported from Washington and Lauter reported from Florida, North Carolina and Virginia.