Kerry Hammers Home Attack on Bush Over Iraq

John Kerry yesterday launched his most aggressive attack to date on President Bush's foreign policy, in a clear sign that the senator and his aides have decided that he cannot win the November election by focusing on traditional Democratic issues.

The strategy of challenging his opponent's strongest suit - national security - is a gamble.

Polls suggest that a significant majority of Americans trust the president more on Iraq and the "war on terror".

But it shows that Mr Kerry has defied the advice of some Democrats and concluded that he will not beat the president by shifting the debate to the economy, healthcare and education.

The senator is behind in all the latest national polls, but appears to have closed the gap on Mr Bush to within five points over the past week.

In a speech yesterday at Temple University in Philadelphia, he accused the president of trying to cover up the country's plight in Iraq and in the counter-terrorist struggle, with upbeat language about US progress.

"We need national leaders who will face reality, not only in Iraq but in the war on terror," Mr Kerry said.

He went further than he has before in the campaign, in making specific claims about the state of the battle: "An estimated 18,000 al-Qaida-trained militants are operating in 60 countries around the world in a dangerous and more elusive network of extremist groups."

The remark was a direct response to the president's claims that three-quarters of al-Qaida's leadership had been captured or killed.

Mr Kerry also said that, while the threat of terrorists obtaining weapons of mass destruction was the justification for invading Iraq, the most likely source for such weapons was the former Soviet Union; and he claimed that in the three years since the September 11 attacks the president had failed to expand a pre-existing US policy of securing old Soviet nuclear material.

"More such materials were secured in the two years before 9/11 than in the two years after," he said. "I will secure all nuclear weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union within four years. At President Bush's pace, it will take 13 years."

Jeff Shesol, a political historian and a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, said Mr Kerry had little choice but to mount an attack on the president's strongest issue, in defiance of advice from some senior Democrats to stick to bread-and-butter domestic issues.

"He's got to do it if he's going to win," Mr Shesol said. "There's always a temptation for Democrats to say, 'Let's run on our issues and let them run on their issues.' But when 'their issues' are on the top of people's list of concerns, we would be unwise to give them a by."

Mr Shesol said Mr Kerry and his advisers had "finally focused their message on Iraq, and I think that at no point in the debate has the discrepancy of Bush rhetoric and reality on the ground been so great ...

"Kerry has exploited that, and it may be a very promising approach for them."

The Republican response to the attacks on the administration's foreign policy has been to suggest that a vote for Mr Kerry would help to undermine US troops in Iraq and weaken the fight against al-Qaida.

Mr Bush said on Thursday that Mr Kerry's criticisms "can embolden an enemy" and Vice-President Dick Cheney accused the Democratic candidate of being "destructive" to the war effort in Iraq and the fight against terrorists.

Those comments, increasingly echoed by other senior Republicans in recent days, have triggered outrage among Democrats, who say they go beyond the normal bounds of campaign debate. The Kerry campaign called the remarks "un-American" and "undemocratic".

Robert Dallek, a presidential historian, said it was normal for the party in power "to wrap itself in the flag" in wartime, but that the most Republican rhetoric had gone further than that of past masters of attack politics, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

"There are degrees and degrees of doing this," Mr Dallek said.

"In the past it was more implicit. This stuff the Republicans are doing now is really going over the top."

Michael Wissot, a pollster for Luntz Research, which mainly advises Republican candidates, said the rhetoric ran the risk of backfiring, "because people understand that this is much more than a question of an individual, and much more a question of collective policy decisions".

But Mr Shesol said: "I think the fact that Cheney's argument has been echoed repeatedly and very deliberately by senior Republicans suggests that their own polling tells them that it does have an impact."