US: In his first major assault on George Bush over the war in Iraq, Senator John Kerry yesterday accused the US President of leading America in the wrong direction with wrong choices and wrong leadership writes Conor O'Clery in New York.
Elsewhere in an increasingly heated election campaign, Vice President Dick Cheney outraged Democrats by warning that if Mr Kerry were elected president in November it would increase the danger of another terrorist attack.
Mr Kerry was responding in his speech to a crescendo of criticism from his own party for not strongly articulating the case against Mr Bush's decision to go to war. In Cincinnati, Ohio, he accused the president of leaving a trail of broken promises and following a go-it-alone policy that cost the country $2,000 billion (€1,641 billion) that could be used for health care, education and jobs. Mr Bush failed to build a strong coalition, ignored the advice of his military commanders and rushed to war without a plan for peace, said the Democratic challenger to waves of applause from a partisan audience.
America had been forced to bear the cost in the lives of 1,000 US soldiers, he went on. It had to bear 90 per cent of the financial cost whereas in the first Gulf War, US allies had provided 95 per cent of the cost.
"It's time to lead America in a new direction," said Mr Kerry. "George W Bush's wrong choices have led America in the wrong direction on Iraq and left America without the resources we need here at home." The president's choices in Iraq have led to "spreading violence, growing extremism, havens for terrorists that weren't there before."
At the same venue on October 7th, 2002, Mr Bush made a highly alarmist and since discredited case for Congressional authority to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Mr Bush said then he had evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme and was working on a fleet of unarmed vehicles to attack the US "on any given day" with chemical or biological weapons.
He said Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire enriched uranium and if it succeeded "it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year". The speech was influential in persuading Congress to give Mr Bush war powers some days later and Mr Kerry voted for it, while urging Mr Bush to proceed slowly and give diplomacy a chance to work.
While Republicans have depicted Mr Kerry as a "flip-flopper", Mr Kerry seems intent on associating Mr Bush with the word "wrong", which he used several times in his speech. A protester stood at the beginning of his speech and started to yell, but a member of the Sheet Metal Workers union put him in a headlock and Secret Service agents escorted him outside.
Mr Cheney made his attack on Kerry at a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa. He told supporters it was "absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again.
"That we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the US, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mindset if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us."
Mr Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, said: "Dick Cheney's scare tactics crossed the line today showing once again that he and George Bush will do anything and say anything to save their jobs."
Later the White House declined to repeat Mr Cheney's warning. Spokesman Mr Scott McClellan told reporters: "There are differences in how the two candidates approach the war on terror. That's what the vice president was talking about in his remarks."