Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said on Tuesday he had been consistent on Iraq and had voted to authorize the use of force because the US needed to stand up to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
But the Massachusetts senator told a rally at the University of Nevada Las Vegas that he would have done it "right."
President George W. Bush accused Kerry of shifting positions on the Iraq war after the Democrat said on Monday he would have voted to give the president authorization to use military force even if he had known no weapons of mass destruction would be found.
"I read somewhere that the Bush folks were trying to say that we changed positions, this that," Kerry said. "I've been consistent all along and I thought that the United States needed to stand up to Saddam Hussein and I voted to stand up to Saddam Hussein, but I thought we should do it right."
"I thought we ought to reach out to other countries, we ought to build an international coalition, we ought to exhaust the remedies available to us."
Earlier on Tuesday, Kerry accused the Bush administration of recklessly putting politics above science and vowed to prevent Nevada from becoming America's nuclear waste dump.
The state's Yucca Mountain -- which Bush approved in 2002 as a burial site for radioactive refuse from nuclear power plants and weapons -- has become a centerpiece of the closely contested Nov. 2 White House race in Nevada.
Kerry said Bush had broken his promise as a candidate in 2000 to base his decision on "sound science, not politics" and cited a slew of skeptical studies from the US government's General Accounting Office, the National Academy of Sciences and other bodies.
"When John Kerry is president, there's going to be no nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, period," he told invited guests at the Ralph Cadwallader Middle School, about 144 km from the site.
While the issue is largely local, it could help determine the presidential race. Nevada is a key battleground state that Bush won in 2000, and without its five electoral votes would not be in the White House. He will visit Las Vegas today.
Bush and his Republican allies say they were relying on years of study by the Energy Department and that they believe scientific concerns will be answered either by the courts or by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in its licensing of the project.
Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt pointed out that Kerry had voted for the 1987 Nuclear Waste Policy Act Amendments, known in the state as the "screw Nevada bill" which was tacked onto budget legislation.
"When it has counted -- on real votes to say `No' to Yucca mountain, I voted `No'," Kerry said.
His vice presidential running mate John Edwards, a senator from North Carolina, voted in 2002 for the Yucca plan but campaign aides said he and Kerry were now on the same page.
The school where Kerry spoke sits near the route that nuclear waste would travel to the repository, just like many other schools and communities in 44 states. The so called "mobile Chernobyls" would pass through many communities that Kerry said were ill-equipped to respond to a nuclear accident, posing a risk to the more than 50 million Americans along the way.
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