Beltway battles.

BELTWAY BATTLES

THE PENTAGON--Not until you step inside do you realize how small the press room here is. Normally, says a Defense Department aide, they don't need that much space. But these days there's easily double the usual number of correspondents, jammed together amid a riot of cables, microphones, and television cameras that have themselves become a critical component of warfare. In the front row, CNN's Wolf Blitzer, a household name these days, scratches out a few notes, while in the back those just arriving ask who will be giving today's briefing. "General Martin Brandtner,c comes the answer. "B-R-A-N-D-T-N-E-R."

A few moments later General Brandtner makes his entrance. He is all Old Corps, the way Americans like their Marines, and along with a soft-spoken Navy captain he carefully gives the latest numbers every time he so much as raises his hand or shifts his body to make a point, the movement is accompanied by the rapid whirr and click of a dozen cameras that stop when he does, so reflexive it looks as if he is making the noise himself.

As it turns out, General Brandtner hasn't much to add today: Two more Iraqi aircraft downed, another Scud missile intercepted. In a McLuhanesque sort of way these are almost side issues. The real communication is political. With every piece of footage of a Patriot missile bringing down a Scud or a smart bomb going through the front door of an Iraqi defense installation, Ronald Reagan's defense buildup of the 1980s stands vindicated. On a subtler level the cumulative effect of these briefings brings home to even the dullest viewer the awesome charge of the Executive. Acknowledging Congress's legitimate supporting role, they make clear that the war is George Bush's responsibility: it is his secretary of defense, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, most important, his decisions.

"The calm, methodical development, first, of the diplomatic and military coalition, and the systematic buildup of military power, have given the President a level of authority which is only reached in wartime," says House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich. "As Wilson and FDR proved, the Commander-in-Chief in a successful conflict towers over the Congress as a leader."

I had always thought the idea that Bush was a foreign-policy wizard and domestic-policy disaster a cliche. But some cliches are true, as the political handling of the Gulf crisis thus far indicates. Bush's mistake in last year's budget negotiations was succumbing to the idea of a summit, which could only elevate a hitherto obscure Democratic leadership to a presidential level at his expense. But, with the decision to go to war, the President has re-established the primacy of the Oval Office, as even Congress was forced to acknowledge during the State of the Union ovations. The brilliant joint performance of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell only magnifies this achievement, as their management of the day-to-day effort frees Mr. Bush from overexposure and inspires confidence in the chain of command.

No one has been more hurt by this than the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn. For the last two years or so, the owlish-looking Georgian has tried to pass himself off as something of a shadow secretary of defense. In peacetime, he could get away with it by convening hearings and holding weapons hostage to his approval. But today, while Bush is busy winning a war, Senator Nunn has been relegated to the talk-show circuit. You don't see him grimly stepping out of limousines at the Pentagon the way you saw House Speaker Tom Foley and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell coming over to the White House during the budget summit.

Probably Nunn would have been diminished anyway, even if he had not voted against the President on the use of force. But with that nay vote--because it was cast for overtly political reasons--Nunn showed he was as much a Democrat as Howard Metzenbaum or Teddy Kennedy, which is to say someone good for getting an outmoded tank contract or new jobs program for his district but not to be trusted with the more critical responsibilities of Executive office.

"Sam Nunn has never accepted the fact that he was just a legislator with broad policy powers, like a member of a board, and he has always posed as a leader for a strong national defense," says Reagan's former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger. "I always found that he waited until he had a consensus or that the majority had lined up before he committed himself, and I don't consider that strong leadership."

Can the White House Capitalize?

THE QUESTION now is whether the White House will use its new-found political capital to drive home the point in the coming months. The test will be in October, in the fight over the military budget. In the past, Congress has stymied White House efforts at overcoming the micromanagement that makes military spending so cumbersome--and expensive. But with the leverage from a successful prosecution of the war in Iraq, and a defense secretary more than up to the task of initiating the necessary changes, no Republican President will ever be in a better position to push for wholesale reform than Bush is today.

Consequently, just as Ronald Reagan's great legacy to George Bush was the expanded capabilities of the U.S. armed forces, Bush's greatest gift to future American Presidents would be prosecuting the war to its full conclusion--leaving America with budgets that reflect strategy and not vice versa. "We can get a lot of what we want," says one GOP Hill staffer. "But we have to make Sam Nunn and the others hurt the same way they made us hurt in the budget battle last year."

Within the Democratic Party the dilemna is more acute. Take Representative Ike skelton (D., Mo.), a traditional Democrat who backed the Contras, supported Reagan's military buildup, voted for President Bush's resolution to use force--and whose Army-lieutenant son is now over in Saudi Arabia. "Most Americans want a strong national defense, and I've just been voting the way most Americans appreciate," says Skelton, noting that the mail from his district has been overwhelmingly supportive. Undoubtedly he's right. Asked, however, whether being right enhances one's position in today's Democratic Party, he is more elliptical, saying only that "the message just doesn't come across to some people."

Those people, however, exert an inordinate influence on the party, and they can probably win internal battles even if it means taking the party down with them nationally. The other side, reading the tea leaves, will set about rewriting the past, as Leslie Gelb already tried to do in the New York times by claiming that the Carter Administration--not Reagan--deserved the credit for the weapons successes in the Gulf.

This doesn't wash with anyone with any kind of memory while the technologies may have existed, without Reagan the weapons never would have. "It doesn't matter who started it," says Senator Malcolm Wallop (R., Wyo.), a member of the Armed Services Committee. "What matters is who pushed it through, because had it been left to the people in charge back then [the Carter Administration! it would have been lost. These are the same people who have been opposing expanding any of our other capabilities." Most of all, Reagan radically altered our idea of defense, moving America from a counterpopulation deterrance based on the unspeakable (Mutual Assured Destruction) to a counteforce deterrence based on the possible.

"It's amusing to see the great lengths they are going to to deny Reagan credit for any of this," says Weinberger. "The simple reason is that Ronald Reagan violated the conventional wisdom. The proponents of the conventional wisdom can forgive him for that. But what they can't forgive him for is being proved right."

Mr. McGurn is NR's Washington bureau chief.