US Democratic White House challenger John Kerry has sharply rebuked President George W. Bush for choosing to go to war in Iraq.
With a tighter stump speech and a sharper message built around a riff on Bush's middle initial, Kerry declared on Tuesday: "W stands for wrong - wrong direction, wrong choices - and it's time to put it right."
He said he would start to do that by internationalizing the security and reconstruction effort in Iraq and showing "the kind of statesmanship and leadership that builds a true coalition to share the costs and share the burden."
The Massachusetts senator has publicly struggled to explain his vote for the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq and his subsequent vote against $87 billion to fund operations there and in Afghanistan. Bush has branded him a flip-flopper.
Since Kerry said last month that he would have voted for the resolution even if he had known that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, Bush has tried to convince voters that they both agreed on the need to get rid of the Iraqi leader.
But Kerry scornfully took Bush to task on the issue, telling a town hall meeting in Greensboro: "He says that he's confused about the differences in our positions on Iraq and he even tried to claim that we had the same positions.
"Let me explain to him in a few simple words -- it's not that I would have done just one thing differently in Iraq, I would have done everything differently in Iraq."
Kerry, who campaigned in Republican-leaning North Carolina, the home state of running mate Sen. John Edwards, called the "mess" that Bush had made in Iraq the president's "most catastrophic" wrong choice.
"It was wrong for America to choose," Kerry said. "This was his choice. He chose the date of the start of this war. He chose the moment and he chose for America to go-it-alone and today all of America is paying the price."
As the number of deaths among U.S. troops neared 1,000, Kerry pointed out that almost all the coalition casualties in Iraq were Americans and then opened a new line of attack by addressing the economic cost of the war and laying out how the money could have been better spent.
"The price tag so far, $200 billion dollars and rising," he said. "That's $200 billion that we're not investing in health care in America, that's $200 billion we're not investing in schools in America, that's $200 billion that were not investing in prescription drugs for seniors."