MASON CITY, Iowa, 21 October 2004 — Wielding the war on terrorism as his main re-election argument, US President George W. Bush said yesterday that Democratic rival John Kerry was blind to the “true dangers” facing the United States.

“The next commander in chief must lead us to victory in this war, and you cannot win a war when you don’t believe you’re fighting one,” Bush told supporters in this key rural state just 13 days before the Nov. 2 election.

The president mined recent comments by Kerry and a top foreign policy adviser to buttress his argument that the Democrat does not understand the nature of the conflict after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist strikes.

“You cannot lead our nation to decisive victory on which the security of every American family depends if you do not see the true dangers of a post-September the 11th world,” the president charged.

Bush quoted Kerry’s comments in a New York Times interview earlier this month that the Sept. 11 attacks “didn’t change me much at all.”

“This unchanged worldview becomes obvious when he calls the war against terror primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation, rather than what I believe: A war which requires the full use of American power to keep us secure,” said Bush.

Bush accurately quoted what Kerry told the Times, though the senator went on to say that the attacks “accelerated, confirmed in me, the urgency of doing the things I thought we needed to be doing.”

“To me, it wasn’t as transformational as it was a kind of anger, a frustration and an urgency that we weren’t doing the kinds of things necessary to prevent it and to deal with it,” the senator said.

In 2000, Bush lost Iowa’s important seven electoral college votes — 270 are needed to win the presidency — to then-vice president Al Gore by just 4,144 votes.

The president was to move on to campaign in other states with tight contests, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The president also attacked Kerry’s repeated claim that the war in Iraq has been a “diversion” from the war on terror, which the Democrat says ought to have stuck to hunting down Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden.

To buttress his argument, Bush invoked Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, the Islamic militant blamed for a spate of beheadings as well as attacks on US forces in Iraq, noting he had recently pledged allegiance to Bin Laden.

“If Zarqawi and his associates were not busy fighting American forces in Iraq, does Senator Kerry think he would be leading a productive and peaceful life? Of course not.

“And that’s why Iraq is no diversion, but a central commitment to the war on terror a place where our military is confronting and defeating terrorists overseas so we do not have to face them here at home,” said Bush.

Cheney Resorts to Use of Scare Tactics

President Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney’s campaign rhetoric stunned many Tuesday, when Cheney raised the frightening prospect of terrorists attacking US cities with nuclear weapons.

“The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us - biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans,” Cheney told Republican supporters in Carroll, Ohio.

Cheney then said Democratic presidential contender Sen. Kerry was trying to persuade voters he would be the same type of “tough, aggressive” leader as Bush in the fight against terrorism, the vice president said. “I don’t believe it.”

Calling it “the ultimate threat,” Cheney said: “For us to have a strategy that’s capable of defeating that threat, you’ve got to get your mind around that concept,” suggesting Kerry would be unable to cope with the threat.

The Kerry campaign called Cheney’s comments “scare tactics,” and blasted the Bush administration for doing too little too late to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

The Kerry campaign also issued a press release criticizing Cheney for having the “audacity to question whether a decorated combat veteran (i.e. Kerry) who has bled on the battlefield is tough and aggressive enough to keep America safe.”

Cheney “wants to scare Americans about a possible nuclear 9/11 while the Bush administration has been on the sidelines while the nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran...have increased,” said a press release put out by the Kerry campaign.

Kerry’s running mate, Sen. John Edwards, was in New Hampshire, where he accused the Republicans of trying to scare voters into re-electing the president. “While they campaign on fear, we’re going to talk about the facts,” he said.