Kerry attacks Bush over war in Iraq

NEW YORK – Sen John Kerry offered his most detailed critique yet of President Bush’s policies on Iraq, saying Monday that Bush had “misled, miscalculated and mismanaged every aspect …

“The invasion of Iraq has made us less secure and weaker in the war against terrorism,” added Kerry, who suggested that Saddam Hussein’s removal from power had not been worth the price.

“Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell,” Kerry said. “But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure.”

The broadside by the Democratic presidential nominee had the look of a pre-emptive attack, launched during a hastily scheduled speech at New York University that came just a day before Bush is scheduled to make his annual address before the United Nations General Assembly.

The president immediately mocked Kerry’s latest attack, telling a New Hampshire audience that the opponent he has often accused of flip-flops had done it again, continuing what Bush called a “pattern of twisting in the wind with new contradictions of his old positions on Iraq.”

Bush also derided Kerry’s four-point plan – getting more help from allies, faster training of Iraqi security forces, speedier reconstruction efforts and a guarantee of Iraqi elections by January – as simply a description of what the administration is already doing.

“Forty-three days before the election,” Bush said, “my opponent has now suddenly settled on a proposal for what to do next, and it’s exactly what we’re currently doing.”

Not so, said Kerry.

He noted that just last week the administration acknowledged that it has spent less than $1 billion of the $18 billion committed a year ago for reconstruction. The week before, he said, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld conceded that the number of newly trained Iraqi security forces was less than half the 210,000 he claimed last February. And with just three months to go before the scheduled elections, he added, the United Nations has less than 25 percent of the personnel it will need to play the central role in supervising the vote that Bush had agreed to earlier this year.

“President Bush owes it to the American people to tell the truth and put Iraq on the right track,” Kerry said. “Even more, he owes it to our troops and their families … “

In his speech to supporters in Derry, N.H., Bush seized on Kerry’s apparently contrary statements about Saddam during the Democratic primary campaign last year – that “those who believe we are not safer with his capture, don’t have the judgment to be president.”

Although Bush said Kerry’s Iraq proposals mirrored his own, his campaign put out a strongly worded – and contradictory – statement. “John Kerry’s latest position on Iraq is to advocate retreat and defeat in the face of terror,” said spokesman Steve Schmidt.

And as Bush prepared to address the General Assembly this morning, it wasn’t just Kerry, or Democrats, taking aim at his Iraq policies.

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., a senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said during an appearance Sunday on “Face the Nation” that “we’re in trouble, we’re in deep trouble, in Iraq.”

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Fox News that on Iraq Bush was not being “as straight as we would want him to be.”

Last week U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told a BBC reporter that in his view the U.S. war on Iraq was “illegal” under the U.N. charter. He also questioned whether it would be possible to secure Iraq in time for the national elections now set for January.

Kerry focused on Iraq Monday despite repeated statements from aides that his campaign would begin shifting the focus to domestic economic issues. That he has not done so reflects frustration that Bush’s advantage with voters in most surveys has increased in recent weeks on handling the challenges of terrorism and Iraq. In his speech Kerry suggested a reason: “the president’s failure,” as he put it, “to tell the truth to the American people.”

Kerry asserted that Bush had offered “23 different rationales” for going to war against Iraq, most of which he said were now discredited. He said the two major claims, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to the al Qaeda terrorist network and the Sept. 11 attacks, had been disavowed by the administration’s own weapons inspectors, by the Sept. 11 commission and by senior officials such as Secretary of State Colin Powell.

“Only Vice President Cheney still insists that the Earth is flat,” Kerry said, referring to Dick Cheney’s continuing assertions that earlier suspicions about Iraq might yet prove out.