Governor Visits U.S. Troops in Germany as He Wraps Up Trip

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany — Ending his first foreign trip on an exultant note, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger joked with appreciative American troops at a rally Monday and met privately with a civilian contractor who escaped his captors in Iraq.

Schwarzenegger said Thomas Hamill “looked good” after being kidnapped at gunpoint last month near Baghdad, escaping Sunday and flying to a military hospital here for treatment of a gunshot wound to his arm.

“We had a conversation about things he went through,” Schwarzenegger said. “I kept it as short as possible.... I just tried to let him know we support him and good luck and all of that.”

The meeting was sheer coincidence. Schwarzenegger had planned the Ramstein visit as the last stop in a barnstorming tour that also took him to Israel and Jordan. He and Hamill arrived within a few hours of each other. When the hospital mentioned that Schwarzenegger would be greeting patients and offered to arrange a visit, Hamill agreed, according to the governor’s office. Hamill’s fate stirred widespread sympathy. His captors had threatened to kill him, releasing a videotape that showed his left arm in a cast.

Schwarzenegger, in an interview later, said, “It must be unbearable -- the weeks under the threat of maybe dying.”

After the hospital visit, the governor led a rally of about 400 troops massed at an airplane hangar. The audience was made up of the 435th air base wing and the 86th airlift wing. Schwarzenegger spoke in front of an oversized American flag that nearly swallowed the stage. About 40 troops from California stood behind him.

He opened with a joke -- a joke he later said was funny for its wisp of plausibility.

“I want to thank you all for changing the Constitution of the United States. And I declare here my candidacy for president.” A pause. “Oh, sorry. Wrong speech.”

Because he is foreign-born, Schwarzenegger is barred by the Constitution from running for president.

Rolling out a series of one-liners, Schwarzenegger asked the crowd: “You know what Ramstein means in Native American? It means kicking some serious ass.”

The young servicemen and women brought with them photos of Schwarzenegger printed from the Internet. They held DVDs of the governor’s movies and copies of his bodybuilding books, hoping for an autograph. The lure seemed less to do with his policies than his celebrity.

“It’s not very often you see someone with the stature of Arnold Schwarzenegger coming here,” said 19-year-old Airman 1st Class Derrick Lugo of Augusta, Ga. “Lots of other governors have been here before, and to be honest, no one cares.”

After the rally, Schwarzenegger gave a series of interviews, then boarded his private plane for the long trip home. His three-day travels abroad proved frenetic: meetings with Israeli government officials, memorials to Holocaust victims, a dedication for a new museum in Jerusalem.

There were shopping trips in the hotel lobby in Tel Aviv, meetings with members of the Israeli Special Olympics, and formal banquets with his hosts.

“It was like every hour was packed. And that’s important to me,” Schwarzenegger said, “because you don’t want to go that far and just hang. I always said I don’t want to be a governor that hangs. I like to do things.”

And say things. More so than at any point in his tenure so far, Schwarzenegger ventured opinions over the last few days on some of the stickiest foreign policy questions -- from the war in Iraq to the question of a separate Palestinian state.

Asked in an interview Monday whether the U.S. approach in Iraq was working, the governor said: “I think everyone is asking themselves the question.”

Schwarzenegger’s office has been issuing news releases about California troops who were killed -- steady reminders of the war’s cost. “Any war concerns me,” the governor said. “Any time people lose their lives, it concerns me.”

Before arriving in Germany, the governor ate lunch Monday with Jordanian King Abdullah II. The king provided a helicopter for Schwarzenegger’s half-hour trip from Tel Aviv to Amman. An Israeli Black Hawk helicopter bristling with missile launchers and machine guns protectively shadowed the governor to the Jordanian border.

The menu included pan-fried salmon, marinated medallions of beef and homemade spaghetti at the king’s palace. Schwarzenegger was accompanied by his chief of staff, Patricia Clarey, and his personal financial advisor, Paul Wachter. Jordan’s royal film commissioner joined them for a meeting.

Schwarzenegger has faced anger from the Arab world for spending most of his time in Israel. The Jordan lunch, which was a late addition, was seen as an effort to answer the governor’s critics.

But Schwarzenegger scoffed at that perception. The king invited him to the palace while visiting his Brentwood home weeks ago, he said.

“We didn’t leave out anyone,” the governor said. “I want to reiterate that we are a very inclusive administration and we are ready to meet anybody, any group at any time.”

Discussion with the king touched on “the economy, Middle East politics and all that stuff,” Schwarzenegger said.

He also defended the motives behind his expressions of sympathy for Holocaust victims. During the recall campaign, he faced charges that he had once spoken admiringly of Hitler.

Did he go to Israel in the hope that people will drop the matter once and for all?

“I’m absolutely convinced that the Nazi thing and all those things could come up at any other given time,” he said. “I am not going out there trying to not have people talk about it because it would be an endless process. I do what’s important to me.”

Before the trip, Middle East experts cautioned that politicians were prone to gaffes when talking about the region. They advised the governor to play it safe. But Schwarzenegger waded into a few disputes.

He said he supported the notion of a separate state for Palestinians, though he did not articulate to reporters how that would work. And in a joint appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, he backed Sharon’s plan for withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Sharon’s Likud Party rejected the plan in a vote Sunday.

On one question, though, the governor remained elusive. After teasing the troops about possible presidential ambitions, he said he had merely been joking. He said he comes up with jokes and then tries them out on staff. That said, he added that humor works when there is “a little bit of truth to it.”