Statements by two top US policymakers contradicting administration dogma on Iraq provided new fuel Tuesday to relentless Democratic criticisms of President George W. Bush that have jolted his re-election bid.
Paul Bremer, former civilian overseer of occupied Iraq, said the United States never had enough troops on the ground to establish control and was remiss in not stamping out looting and other violence after Baghdad fell.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld added to Bush's embarrassment by saying he had not seen any convincing evidence linking Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al aeda terrorists as claimed by the White House.
Bremer and Rumsfeld both rushed to issue clarifications of their remarks, made in separate speeches Monday. But Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry wasted no time Tuesday in using them to score political points.
"There are a long list of mistakes," the Massachusetts senator told a rally in the Midwestern state of Iowa, a key battleground in the November 2 election that has tightened up in recent days.
"I'm glad that Paul Bremer has finally admitted at least two of them," Kerry told the crowd. "And the president of the United States needs to tell the truth to the American people."
The Democrat has been on a roll since his first televised debate with Bush last Thursday, where his pointed attacks on the rationale and conduct of the Iraq war rattled the usually sure-footed president. Polls unanimously gave Kerry a victory in the encounter, with several showing him cutting deeply into the Republican's standing on security issues and pulling even in the overall race.
Even ABC News, which had Bush clinging to a five-point lead, had bad news for him on Iraq. The number who said he had no clear strategy in the war rose six points to 48 percent; the percentage who felt Kerry had a plan rose five points to 42 percent.
Republicans hope to refocus the campaign on Bush's leadership in the war on terror after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and they said they would start in Tuesday night's debate between the vice presidential candidates.
But the comments by Bremer and Rumsfeld could complicate their task as they echoed two main Kerry criticisms, that Bush trumped up ties between Saddam and al Qaeda and did not support his March 2003 invasion with sufficient manpower.
"We never had enough troops on the ground," Bremer told a conference in West Virginia, according to a transcript supplied by the organisers.
He said the lack of adequate patrols after the fall of Baghdad had allowed "horrid" looting. "We paid a big price for not stopping it, because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness."
Bremer later sent a statement to the Washington Post, which carried his original remarks, to stress his belief "that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq." He said his references to inadequate manpower referred to May 2003, when he arrived in Baghdad "and when I believed we needed either more coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting."
The defence chief, a key shaper of Iraq policy, said there were differences in the intelligence community as to what the relationship was. "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two," he said.