Candidates Lock Horns on Iraq, War on Terrorism

In his most blistering attack yet on his opponent’s credentials on national security, President Bush on Monday unleashed a lengthy critique of Sen. John F. Kerry’s position on Iraq and warned that the Democrat’s policies would raise the danger of new terrorist attacks in the United States.

“While America does the hard work of fighting terror and spreading freedom, he has chosen the easy path of protest and defeatism,” Bush told several hundred supporters in this Philadelphia suburb. “Giving up the fight might seem easier in the short run, but we learned on September the 11th that if violence and fanaticism are not opposed at their source, they will find us where we live.”

In a speech that lasted nearly an hour and referred repeatedly to the terrorist attacks, Bush used selective citations of Kerry’s comments and legislative record to portray the Democrat as advocating retreat in Iraq and “giving up” the fight against terrorism.

Kerry, campaigning earlier in the day in Florida, tried to preempt Bush’s expected attack by criticizing what he called the president’s “arrogant” approach to the war in Iraq.

The Democrat, who had planned on pounding the administration for the nation’s shortage of flu vaccine, switched gears to capitalize on a report in Monday’s Washington Post that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq last year, complained last winter that a lack of supplies threatened the Army’s fighting capacity.

“Despite the president’s arrogant boasting that he’s done everything right in Iraq and that he’s made no mistakes, the truth is beginning to come out and it’s beginning to catch up with him,” Kerry said at a West Palm Beach retirement community. “And on Nov. 2, it will catch up with him.”

Both the Democratic challenger and Republican incumbent made stops Monday in Florida, one of four states that opened polling places for early voting. There were long lines and a few computer glitches reported across the state but no major problems with newly installed electronic voting machines.

Kerry, on the second day of a Florida swing, joined Democratic Florida Sens. Bob Graham and Bill Nelson in urging residents to cast their ballots.

“If you vote early now, we don’t have to stay up late on Tuesday night, Nov. 2,” Kerry told seniors in West Palm Beach. “I want you to get out and get the job done.”

Bush began his campaigning in Marlton with a speech that aides advertised as a major address on foreign policy. It turned out to be a point-by-point attack on his rival.

After several days of portraying Kerry as an out-of-mainstream liberal, Bush returned to a central issue of the 2004 campaign: Who best can lead the country as violence rages on in Iraq and the threat of terrorism looms?

The president suggested that Kerry learned nothing from the Sept. 11 attacks and would take a defeatist approach to terrorism.

“He has complained that my administration, quote, ‘relies unwisely on the threat of military preemption against terrorist organizations,’ ” Bush said. “He says that preemptive action is unwise not only against regimes but even against terrorist organizations. Sen. Kerry’s approach would permit a response only after America is hit.”

In fact, Kerry has explicitly endorsed using preemptive attacks when the U.S. is under threat.

The Kerry quote Bush referred to came from an op-ed article in March 2003, in which he argued for tougher efforts to find and destroy terrorist organizations, saying the threat of preemption was inadequate on its own: “It is troubling that this administration’s approach to the menace of loose nuclear materials is long on rhetoric but short on execution. It relies unwisely on the threat of military preemption against terrorist organizations, which can be defeated if they are found but will not be deterred by our military might.”

Aides said Kerry would fight back vigorously against the latest assault, saying it presented an opportunity to remind voters of what they called Bush’s bad judgments on the war.

The Kerry campaign released a new television commercial called “Bush’s Mess,” which attacked his handling of Iraq and the war on terrorism; Kerry advisors said they would unveil a second ad today.

Kerry plans to respond directly to his rival’s charges with a speech Wednesday in Waterloo, Iowa.

Bush “is running a campaign now for months that has primarily been based on distortion and mischaracterization and taking things out of context,” said Kerry senior advisor Joe Lockhart. “It is now a fundamentally dishonest campaign from a fundamentally dishonest president.”

The choice of New Jersey, a state that has leaned Democratic, as the location for Bush’s new speech was deliberate. Polls have found the race there surprisingly close.

With his stop in Marlton, Bush also sought to reach an audience of voters across state lines in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state.

Two new national polls continue to show a close race. A CBS News-New York Times poll released late Monday showed Bush holding a slim lead over Kerry, 47% to 45% among likely voters nationwide. Independent candidate Ralph Nader had 2%, and 6% of voters were unsure who to support. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

A Washington Post poll showed Bush at 50% and Kerry at 47% with Nader getting 1%. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Both candidates’ focus on Iraq demonstrated that the war remained the campaign’s dominant theme. And for Bush, in particular, it’s the one issue on which polls suggest he enjoys a clear advantage over Kerry.

“A reporter recently asked Sen. Kerry how September the 11th changed him,” the president said. “He replied, ‘It didn’t change me much at all.’ His unchanged world view is obvious from the policies he still advocates.”

Kerry’s comments in an interview with the New York Times referred to the fact that he had written about the dangers of nonstate threats before the Sept. 11 attacks and advocated policies to combat them.

Bush used his speech in part to respond to some of Kerry’s previous charges, including that the war in Iraq had been a “diversion” from the larger fight against terrorism. But in doing so, he made some assertions that had been contradicted by officials of his administration or the intelligence community.

Bush implied a link, for example, between Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian extremist leader, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, saying Zarqawi “fled to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where he received medical care and set up operations with some two dozen terrorist associates.”

Last summer, the CIA said that while Zarqawi had spent time in Iraq, it knew of no evidence that the regime had harbored or supported the Jordanian while he was there.

Bush also revived a long-standing Republican mantra this year, played out in speeches and television ads, that Kerry is weak on defense. He said Kerry had proposed in 1994, one year after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, to cut $6 billion in the intelligence budget. And he told supporters that Kerry tried, but failed, to cut intelligence funding again a year later.

He also ticked off the names of six weapons systems that he said Kerry voted against.

“Sen. Kerry has a record of trying to weaken American intelligence,” the president said.

According to factcheck.org, a website operated by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, Kerry has been more of a supporter than an opponent of weapons systems that troops depend on.

Moreover, factcheck.org said, Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush, had proposed cutting or eliminating several of the weapons systems that the president now faults Kerry for opposing. Those proposals came after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

It is true that Kerry proposed cutting the intelligence budget by several billion dollars in 1994. But that amendment, defeated on a 75-20 Senate vote, was part of a larger effort on Capitol Hill to reduce the deficit and had the support of some Republicans.

Kerry, campaigning in West Palm Beach, said he was proud to have voted for or supported “the largest defense budgets” in the nation’s history, as well as “every single weapons system that we’ve used in Iraq.”

He also peppered his 30-minute speech with at least half a dozen references to his military service, returning to a theme many Democrats said he relied on too heavily during the spring and summer.

“I’ll never send our soldiers into harm’s way without the equipment that they need, because I’ve been one of those soldiers and I know what that means,” Kerry said.

Speaking later at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Kerry argued that it was Bush who had proven to be the risky prospect when it came to matters of war and national security.

“Mr. President, you can choose to ignore the facts, but in the end you can’t hide the truth from the American people,” he said. “Your mismanagement of the war has in fact made Iraq and America less safe and less secure than they could have and that they should have been today.”

Kerry charged that his rival was indifferent to increases in healthcare costs and anxiety among Americans about the flu-shot shortage. He noted that officials in Bloomfield, N.J., had decided to distribute the town’s 300 flu shots by lottery.

“With senior citizens standing in line for hours, mothers frantic about how to protect their children, this president gave the public his solution: Don’t get a flu shot,” Kerry said.

During the Oct. 13 debate, Bush appealed to healthy Americans to forgo flu shots to make sure enough were available for the elderly and very young.

Reynolds reported from Marlton, N.J., Gold from West Palm Beach and Tampa. Times staff writers Michael Finnegan, Greg Miller and Paul Richter contributed to this report.