by Olivier Knox
LAS VEGAS, Nevada, Aug 12 (AFP) - Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday spearheaded a fresh attack on Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry, mocking him for vowing to rally allies to a "more sensitive" war on terrorism.
US President George W. Bush, meanwhile, visited Las Vegas two days after Kerry stumped for votes here and was poised to campaign in heavily Democratic California with its popular Republican Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Cheney kicked off a nasty back-and-forth by deriding Kerry's pledge last week to wage "a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations."
"A 'sensitive war' will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans and who seek the chemical, nuclear and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more," he said in a reference to the September 11 terrorist strikes.
"The people who beheaded (Wall Street Journal reporter) Daniel Pearl and (US contractor) Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity," the vice president said in the crucial battleground state of Ohio.
The Kerry campaign swung into action, charging that Cheney had deliberately twisted the Massachusetts senator's comments and accusing Bush of weakening the war on terrorism by alienating allies.
What "Dick Cheney doesnt understand is that arrogance isnt a virtue, especially when our country is in danger. Alienating allies makes it harder to hunt terrorists and bring them justice," said Kerry spokesman Phil Singer.
Kerry has made patching up ties with traditional allies who did not support the March 2003 invasion of Iraq a key theme of his foreign policy message, saying this will help bring US troops home more quickly.
"I think that diplomacy should be tried first" while military action ought to be the "last option," Bush said at a Las Vegas rally with one of the rare unions that may back his reelection bid.
"Knowing what I know today I would have made the same decision" to attack iraq, said the president, who was to head to Los Angeles for a fundraiser, aided by the star power of Schwarzenegger.
Recent polls show that the action star, a political moderate who disagrees with Bush on some key issues, is hugely popular California, which the president lost by a landslide in 2000 and where he trails Kerry by double-digits.
But Schwarzenegger's impact on the November 2 elections remains a question mark: He is unlikely to swing his state into Bush's "win" column but he could raise money and draw moderate voters to Bush's camp in closer contests.
The Los Angeles Times reported Thursday that Schwarzenegger, who will give a prime-time speech at the Republican nominating convention, may be changing his mind about saying that he will not campaign for Bush outside California.
"If there's a place, one place where they want to pop me in, this makes sense for me," he told the daily in an interview.
Although Bush's reelection focuses heavily on the dominant theme of national security, he took the time in Las Vegas to heed the US axiom that "all politics is local" with comments on water rights and local anger at his decision to push ahead with storing nuclear waste at a site called Yucca Mountain.
Bush accused his rival of using the Yucca issue as "a political poker chip" and said Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, had in fact voted to place nuclear waste there "several times."
"One day they may change again," said Bush, who won Nevada in 2000. "I think you need straight talk on this issue."