US President George W. Bush on Wednesday broke his silence about missing Iraqi explosives, ripping Democratic Senator John Kerry's "wild charges" of incompetence as symptoms he is unfit to lead.
As he wooed voters in three crucial states ahead of Tuesday's election, Bush said US forces were investigating the fate of the 350 tonnes of high explosives and that Kerry was irresponsibly jumping to conclusions.
PHOTO: AP
"The senator is making wild charges," he said. "This investigation is important and ongoing, and a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief."
The president campaigned Wednesday in the crucial battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, wooing any Democrats unsure about Kerry with warnings that he is him weak on terrorism and out of step with their values.
Amid frequent and deadly attacks on US soldiers in Iraq, Kerry has seized on the missing explosives as a symptom of what he says was wretched planning for the post-war reconstruction and said the Bush team was not being honest.
"What we're seeing is this White House dodging and bobbing and weaving in their usual effort to avoid responsibility, just as they've done every step of the way in our involvement in Iraq," Kerry said in Iowa.
Kerry also said Vice President Dick Cheney, who accused the Democrat of being an "armchair general," "is becoming the chief minister of disinformation" in his defense of the administration.
It was unclear when the explosives went missing. The Pentagon has said it does not know when they disappeared, and Bush said US forces were looking into whether it happened before US troops arrived at the site.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan endorsed that scenario more forcefully, calling it "a likely possibility" that former president Saddam Hussein's regime had moved the materials before the invasion in March last year.
But the International Atomic Energy Agency said this week that the explosives went missing after US-led forces toppled Saddam in April last year.
And a top Iraqi science official said in Baghdad that it was "impossible" that the explosives could have been smuggled out of the al-Qaqaa military site south of Baghdad before the regime fell.
Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the Iraqi science ministry's site monitoring department, said "it is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall."
He said he and other officials had been ordered a month earlier to insure that "not even a shred of paper left the sites."
At a campaign rally in Vienna, Ohio, Bush was introduced by Democratic Senator Zell Miller, who horrified many Democrats by breaking with his party to endorse Bush and delivering a fire-and-brimstone indictment of Kerry at the Republican convention.
Miller, who accused Kerry of trying to undermine the US military to the point that they would only have "spitballs" to use against terrorists, raised eyebrows by challenging a reporter to a duel.
"The political pundits and talking heads said I looked mad and I sounded angry. How very perceptive of them, because I wish more of my party's leaders had the same will to win this war that does President Bush," Miller told the cheering crowd in Ohio.
Bush also starred in his campaign's final TV ad, unusual both for its length, 60 seconds, and for its positive tone.
And he was to hold a closed-door meeting with prominent African-Americans, including local lawmakers, religious figures, and Miss America 2003, Erika Harold.
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