Edwards renews attack on Bush over
Iraq
story.news.yahoo.com
MIAMI (AFP) - Senator John Edwards , the
Democratic vice presidential nominee, kept up the attack on President
George W. Bush in a string of television interviews, as
surrogates for both candidates clashed over Iraq in
the wake of the second presidential debate.
The candidates themselves kept a low
profile as they prepared for their third and
last televised face-off in Arizona on
Wednesday.
Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry
attended church services
Sunday in Miami, while Bush bunkered
down at his Texas ranch to prepare for the
upcoming debate on domestic issues.
A new poll for ABC television, conducted in
part before the last presidential debate
Friday, showed Bush still leading Kerry by
about four percentage points.
The poll of 2,030 adults, conducted October
6-9, gave Bush 50 percent and Kerry 46
percent. The margin of error was 2.5
percentage points.
With both candidates planning to spend the
next few days studying up for their next
encounter, their campaigns continued to
spar over Iraq, fueled by an official report
last week that found Saddam Hussein
(news - web sites) had no weapons of mass
destruction at the time of the invasion.
Edwards, who held his own against Vice
President Dick Cheney in
their first and only debate last week, gave a
string of back-to-back television interviews
on political talk shows Sunday, in which he
said it was a mistake to believe that
Saddam had chemical, biological or nuclear
weapons.
Asked what were his mistakes during his
term in the Senate, Edwards told ABC television: "Believing that there
were weapons of mass destruction."
"It was the right thing to do to give the president the authority to confront
Saddam Hussein. That was the right thing to do."
"But we didn't authorize this president and vice president to make the
mess that they've made," he told CBS television in a later interview.
"They did not do the work to put a coalition in place before they went,"
he said.
"They didn't allow the weapons inspectors to do their job. If they had, we
would know what we know now, that they in fact didn't have weapons of
mass destruction, didn't even have an active program to develop
weapons of mass destruction. And they had no plan to win the peace,"
Edwards said.
Debate over the war has intensified since the top US weapons inspector
in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, released a 1,000-page report that found Saddam
had destroyed most of his chemical and biological weapons after his
1991 Gulf War defeat and that his nuclear program
had "progressively decayed."
US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites)
defiantly defended the invasion of Iraq, saying the United States would
have taken the same decision even if Washington had known at the time
that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.
"He was someone who had an insatiable appetite for weapons of mass
destruction. He had the means, he had the intent, he had the money to
do it," Rice told the "Fox News Sunday" television program.
"You were never going to break the link between Saddam Hussein and
weapons of mass destruction.
"And now we know that, had we waited, he would have gotten out of the
sanctions, he would have undermined them by both trying to pay off
people on the Security Council and doing what he could to keep his
expertise in place," Rice said.
With the two candidates locked in a tight race just 23
days before the November 2 election, states across the
country reported a huge surge in voter registration,
which could lead to an unusually high turnout.
The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS),
organization of the state officials responsible for
keeping voter registration lists, reports
"record-breaking numbers" in all regions of the
country.
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