Political Pressure Helped Vieques Avert Cross Hairs

For years the Pentagon asserted that naval bombing exercises on Vieques Island off the coast of Puerto Rico were necessary for the military preparedness of the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet.

But the decision Thursday by President Bush to end six decades of the exercises was a response not to changing strategic realities but to political ones: the growing power of Puerto Ricans in particular and Latinos in general to make their votes and their influence count.

The administration’s decision comes after months of pressure on the White House from New York and Florida lawmakers, Puerto Rican activists and high-powered Washington lobbyists hired by the government of the island. And it is intertwined with the political hopes of two Republican governors up for reelection: George Pataki of New York and Jeb Bush of Florida.

“My own observation is that it was not good for [President] Bush with Hispanics per se to be insensitive to the largest political issue raised by Hispanics,” said a Republican strategist familiar with the discussions. “I don’t think it was just a Puerto Rican issue; it had become a Latino issue.”

It was officially a Navy decision, but even conservative lawmakers said they believe that the ultimate call was made by White House political strategists.

Over the last four months, pressure had been rising on the White House to order a Navy retreat from the island, where critics have long called the bombings a significant health threat. Pataki, hoping to win more than the 25% of the Latino vote he garnered in 1998, pressed the issue in at least half a dozen meetings with President Bush’s top political advisor, Karl Rove. His most recent meeting was at the White House on Tuesday.

Charles Black, one of Washington’s top lobbyists, had been retained by the government of Puerto Rico for months to pound the drums.

And hundreds of protesters, including prominent politicians from New York, Illinois and Florida, had been arrested for trespassing on military test ranges to protest the aerial bombing and ship-to-shore shelling exercises on the island, home to about 9,300 people.

In an interview broadcast in May on Univision, the Spanish language network, President Bush said the United States needed to find another base for its Atlantic live-fire training.

Bush confirmed his decision at a news conference in Goteborg, Sweden, saying the Navy will withdraw from the island that Navy officials call the “crown jewel” of its Atlantic training sites and find another place to practice. He did not give a timetable, but defense officials in Washington said the exercises would end by May 2003.

“My attitude is that the Navy ought to find somewhere else to conduct its exercises--for a lot of reasons,” Bush said. “One, there’s been some harm done to people in the past. Secondly, these are our friends and neighbors and they don’t want us there.

“And so I appreciate the fact that the Defense Department and the Navy responded and have made the statement loud and clear that, within a reasonable period of time, that the Navy will find another place to practice and to be prepared to keep the peace. It’s the right agreement.”

The administration’s decision was cemented at a meeting that Rove convened Wednesday with Navy Secretary Gordon England, Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a senior White House official said.

“Rove was sensitive to the fact” that it had become a broad issue among Latinos, the Republican strategist familiar with the discussions said.

But Puerto Rican leaders said Thursday that the planned Navy retreat from Vieques may not come soon enough to satisfy them.

“It falls short of resolving the problem because any continuation of the bombing is simply unacceptable for the people of Puerto Rico,” Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress, Resident Commissioner Anibel Acevedo-Vila, told The Times.

Pentagon officials spent much of the day in consultations with lawmakers, including with conservatives who remain angry that the administration so hastily popped the decision on them. Several complained about their lack of access to high-level White House officials on the issue and said they were privately convinced that White House worries about the Latino vote were at the bottom of the decision.

In a news conference, an angry Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the armed services readiness subcommittee, said Vieques “is an issue that means American lives.”

He predicted that the Navy’s withdrawal from Vieques would raise pressure from neighbors of U.S. and foreign bases for the military to scale back activities there.

“We are going to lose other ranges,” he predicted, and vowed to “do everything in my power” to block the abandonment of the site.

Rep. Bob Stump (R-Ariz.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said the Vieques site is “irreplaceable” and complained about the “suddenness” of the White House decision to withdraw.

The Navy said it conducted two studies on possible alternative sites, ranging from the North Sea to the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, but has found nothing that comes close to duplicating Vieques. Now England says the Navy needs to rethink its training requirements and explore whether it can use new technologies to provide the same kinds of training in a far smaller space.

But many knowledgeable observers, including lawmakers from both parties, believe that it will be difficult to duplicate the training Vieques has provided, even by exploiting new technologies.

The Bush administration is not the first to grapple with the Vieques issue. The Clinton administration had refused to act on Puerto Rico’s demand that the exercises be suspended. Last year the previous governor of Puerto Rico, Pedro J. Rossello, struck a deal with the Clinton administration that allowed bombing to continue in exchange for a vote that would give Vieques residents a choice between ending the bombing in May 2003 or receiving $90 million in aid. The new governor, Sila Calderon, repudiated that agreement in January, ramping up political pressure to stop the bombing immediately.

Defense officials said Navy Secretary England had decided to withdraw from Vieques out of a recognition that it was bad policymaking to “make a national security decision by referendum,” as the Clinton administration had planned.

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters that Pentagon officials had come to the view that it would be a “stigma” for the U.S. government to fail in a referendum and be pushed out of the island site.

At the White House, a senior official echoed that view.

“The issue is not really one of politics. If it were, we’d get out right now. The issue is: Do we want to establish the terrible precedent of deciding military policy by referendum?” he said.

Still, he noted, “This was the No. 1 issue for the Hispanic caucus.”

Warner said administration officials had shared their worries about the rising political turmoil associated with the Vieques bombing. Wolfowitz had told him several weeks ago of his concerns about the “deteriorating” situation in Vieques, Warner said.

Defense officials are now drafting legislative language for the fiscal 2002 defense authorization bill that will undo the requirement for a binding referendum in Vieques in November.

The proposal will probably lead to hearings in both houses of Congress. Conservatives predicted the hearings would be stormy and could raise further questions about the Bush administration’s handling of the issue.

Some Navy supporters in Congress had suggested that if a referendum went against the Navy, Congress could simply overturn it, but the White House considered that unrealistic.

The White House decision also brought rueful comments from some senior military officers.

Most of them supported Bush in the election. But many were angered by the Vieques decision. And they have been disappointed already that, in the aftermath of the big Bush tax cut, the defense spending increases they had eagerly anticipated now appear likely to be much smaller.

Times staff writers Ronald Brownstein and Doyle McManus in Washington, John J. Goldman in New York and Edwin Chen in Sweden contributed to this story.