Front-runner John Kerry, buoyed by the endorsement of Virginia's governor as Democratic presidential nominee, accused President George W. Bush on Sunday of trying to revise his Iraq war rationale after the fact.
At a news conference, Kerry challenged Bush's assertion during a televised morning talk show that the US went to war with Saddam Hussein because it knew he had the ability to make weapons of mass destruction.
"This is a far cry from what the president and his administration told the American people through 2002," Kerry said. "Back then President Bush repeatedly told the American people that Saddam Hussein has got chemical weapons.
"They told us they could deploy these weapons within 45 minutes to injure our troops," the four-term senator from Massachusetts added. "It was on that basis that he sent Americans' sons and daughters off to war."
No chemical or biological weapons have been found in Iraq since the invasion last March. US weapons hunter David Kay said last month "we were almost all wrong" to accuse Saddam of having stockpiles of these weapons.
Kerry defended his own vote in Congress on the war. He said he had voted in favor of a process that called for the president to build a global coalition, use the UN weapons inspection process and "go to war as a matter of last resort."
"I said in my speech on the floor of the Senate, `If the president makes an end run around the UN and doesn't fully honor the inspection process, I will oppose it," Kerry said. "I voted very clearly for the process of honoring the UN."
Reporters quizzed the Massachusetts senator, who volunteered for Vietnam and was decorated for his duty there, about Bush's statement that his honorable discharge from the National Guard demonstrated he had fully performed his military duty.
"The issue here, as I have heard it raised, is: was he present and active on duty in Alabama at the times he was supposed to be?" Kerry said. "I don't have the answer to that question and just because you get an honorable discharge does not, in fact, answer that question."
Asked whether the president's military record should be examined more closely, Kerry replied: "That's up to you and other people. It's not an issue I'm making."
Kerry met Governor Mark Warner over breakfast at the governor's mansion. Warner later endorsed Kerry for president, a move that will give him a boost in Virginia's primary election for the nomination on Tuesday.
Warner described Kerry as a candidate who has a "record of fiscal responsibility."
"I know he will be inheriting a ... budget mess when he takes the White House -- but his record going back to the 1980s when he broke with some in our party to support Gramm-Rudman (the 1985 balanced budget law) makes him the right man to bring back fiscal sanity to our nation's capital," Warner said.
Kerry resumed his attack on Bush during a visit to Chesapeake, Virginia, a town near a major US naval base. He accused Bush of playing "dress-up on an aircraft carrier" when he visited troops returning from Iraq in front of a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished."
"This is a White House of facades. This is a White House of photo opportunities. This is the biggest say-one-thing, do-another administration that I've ever seen in all the time I've been in public life," he told a rally of about 1,000 people.
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