Quayle Says U.S. Is in a ‘Just War’ : Vice president: He delivers rousing pep talks on his visit to the Southland. At a church service, he calls the conflict a contest of good against evil.

He rallied the faithful and the patriotic--the warriors and the worshipers--and the 2,200 people at the Crystal Cathedral were moved to thunderous applause Thursday when Vice President Dan Quayle assured them that the United States is engaged in a “just war” in the Persian Gulf.

Against the backdrop of a gigantic American flag hanging 128 feet from the cathedral’s ceiling to the floor, and a billboard-sized television monitor projecting his image out across the massive, jam-packed sanctuary, Quayle characterized the conflict in the Gulf as a contest of good against evil.

Quayle made a swing through Southern California on Thursday, having breakfast with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, delivering rousing pep talks to flag-waving crowds at Marine bases in El Toro and Camp Pendleton, and delivering his midday speech to the daily, televised “Operation Desert Prayer” service.

“He gave us a lot of encouragement, really made us feel we are important,” Kathy Carey, whose husband is in the Middle East, said at Camp Pendleton. “Maybe he didn’t go over,” she said of Quayle, who had a student deferment and later served in the Indiana National Guard during the Vietnam War. “He did serve his country. I think people ought to get off his back.”

Quayle also had a determined fan among those greeting him at El Toro. Kelly Bishop, an 8th-grader at El Toro’s Serrano Intermediate School, was on hand to give him a bouquet of flowers. She had written him asking for information about himself after her history teacher made “negative” remarks about Quayle and the Administration, she said.

In making his point at the daily interdenominational prayer service that the allied effort in the Gulf is just, the vice president cited sources as diverse as St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Immanuel Kant, Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower.

“It is necessary that the belligerents have a right intention, so that they intend the advancement of good or the avoidance of evil,” Quayle said, quoting Aquinas. “Judging by these criteria, Operation Desert Storm is truly a just war.”

While other high-ranking Bush Administration officials have pointedly cautioned that difficult days may lie ahead in the Gulf, Quayle dwelled on the rightness of the cause Thursday.

Just as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has called upon the Muslim faithful to wage a holy war against countries arrayed against him, Quayle on Thursday said, in effect, that the U.S.-led coalition is already waging one. He said the Crystal Cathedral is an appropriate place to proclaim a moral crusade.

“God listens, God understands and God answers,” Quayle told the congregation in Garden Grove. Saying it was not a question of whose side God was on in the war, he added: “It’s a question of are we on God’s side. I’m confident we are.”

He later explained that he emphasized “the morality of this war because war, on its face is ugly. War means death. When you are going to engage in war, you need to communicate the morality of it. Not every war is moral. Not every war is just. But this one is.”

The daily service--initiated when hostilities broke out in the Gulf Jan. 17--began with the singing of the national anthem and closed with the Crystal Cathedral’s pastor, the Rev. Robert Schuller, imploring the crowd to “shoot Saddam Hussein with God’s love.”

The patriotic tone was set early on when Rabbi Daniel E. Lapin of the Pacific Jewish Center in Venice said during his invocation that “to pray for peace would be to express just a sentiment. We pray for victory, then for peace.”

The church’s pews were decorated with yellow ribbons, and children used collection plates not to collect donations, but to distribute yellow slips of paper with the names of soldiers killed or missing in the Gulf War.

Schuller asked those at the service to pray for the person named on their slip of paper, and worshipers were given bumper stickers reading “Operation Desert Prayer” as they left the service.

Schuller admitted during the service that although God calls upon people to love their enemies, he felt unable to extend his love to Saddam Hussein. He said it was up to all of those at the service to admit their failure to God and ask God’s help in swiftly ending the war.

At a brief news conference after his breakfast with Thatcher, Quayle said “the prestige and respect for the United States is greater in the Middle East today than at any time. Never before have we been invited into an Arab country like Saudi Arabia. You don’t invite a country into your country to defend it unless you are welcome.”

At Camp Pendleton where the sound of 155-millimeter howitzers boomed in the distance, Quayle spoke to 1,500 wildly cheering relatives of Marines sent to the Gulf. Since the departure of 37,000 personnel from the base, one Marine spokesman said, Camp Pendleton has turned into “a virtual ghost town.”

“Your loved ones are doing a superb job for the United States of America,” Quayle said. “Your Marines are American heroes. You, too, are American heroes.”

Afterward, Quayle met privately with some the relatives--a “moving experience” he said he will never forget. Following that meeting he said that “one young widow stood up and told me how proud she was of the President, of the country and how proud she was that her husband made the contribution that he did.”

The Vice President said that he and the young woman “hugged and embraced,” adding that he wished he could tell the relatives “that their loved ones are going to come home tomorrow. But I can’t.”