Kerry in a hard hitting speech to The National Guard - accuses Bush of spinning the news about the war - ignoring advice of the military - mishandling the war on terror.
"Two days ago, the president stood right where I'm standing and did not even acknowledge that more than 1,000 men and women have lost their lives in Iraq. He did not tell you that with each passing day, we're seeing more chaos, more violence, more indiscriminate killings. He did not tell you that with each passing week, our enemies are actually getting bolder, that Pentagon officials report that entire regions of Iraq are now in the hands of terrorists and extremists."
"I believe you deserve a president who isn't going to gild that truth, or gild our national security with politics, who is not going to ignore his own intelligence. . . ." The country deserves a president "who will give the American people the truth, not a fantasy world of spin,"
The president was "wrong to rush to war" without giving U.N. weapons inspectors enough time to do their jobs, without "understanding and planning for the post-war in Iraq," without assembling sufficient backing from U.S. allies and without properly equipping U.S. troops, Kerry said.
And Bush was "wrong to ignore the best advice of America's own military, including his own Army chief of staff, Gen. [Eric K.] Shinseki, who told him how many troops we would need and found himself retired early."
"Perhaps worst of all, the mess in Iraq, by the judgment of many, has set us back in terms of the war on terror," Kerry said. "The simple fact is that when it comes to the war on terror, this administration has taken its eye off the ball."
Bin Laden had been "cornered" in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan in late 2001, but "instead of staying the course . . . George Bush turned over critical military operations in Tora Bora to a band of warlords," Kerry said. "As a result, Osama bin Laden escaped, and we haven't seen him since."
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