WILKES-BARRE, Pennsylvania, Oct 6 (AFP) - US President George W. Bush on Wednesday attacked Democratic rival John Kerry over Iraq and the economy, hoping to sap his foe's momentum two days before their second televised debate.
With his original public case for the invasion to oust Saddam Hussein under fire and the US jobs picture still cloudy just 27 days before the November 2 election, Bush said Kerry was eager to raise taxes and weak against terrorism.
"My opponent has been known to waver," he said in a speech in this crucial up-for-grabs state. "The problem with this approach is obvious: If America waits until a threat is at our doorstep, it might be too late to save lives."
The president accused the Massachusetts senator of having "a strategy of retreat" on Iraq and charged that, on taxes, "I have a record of reducing them. He has a record of raising them."
Meanwhile, the United States opened an aviation trade war over European subsidies to Airbus Wednesday, scrapping a 12-year-old accord and filing a World Trade Organization complaint.
The US attack made good on Bush's threat to take the politically charged case to the global trade body, though the president did not mention it in his speech here.
White House officials had billed the address as "significant," "important," and even "major," but Bush's remarks lacked any fresh policy initiatives despite a wealth of newly sharpened barbs against his Democratic challenger.
But the political usefulness was clear: Bush hoped to build on Vice President Dick Cheney's solid debate performance on Tuesday against Democrat John Edwards and try to recapture momentum in the neck-and-neck race.
"America saw two very different visions of our country and two different hairdos," Bush said, a reference to the contrast between the 63-year-old Cheney's bald pate and the 51-year-old Edwards' thick blond hair.
"I didn't pick my vice president for his hairdo, I picked him for his judgment, his experience," he said. "In less than a month, you'll have a chance to vote for Dick Cheney and me."
Recent polls have found the president's thin lead in national polls narrowed after he was widely judged to have lost his first of three televised face-to-face confrontations with Kerry last Thursday.
Kerry aides dismissed the attacks, with spokesman Phil Singer saying: "the president tried to redo the debate from last week by giving a speech full of untruths he couldn't say on stage with John Kerry because he knew Kerry would knock them down.
"George Bush needs to get real with the American people and start telling the truth," Singer said in a statement.
Bush, speaking before a second debate scheduled for Friday, poked fun at his frequent annoyed or unsettled looks during the first exchange, which some analysts said cost him public support.
The president accused Kerry of changing his mind or espousing flatly contradictory views in last week's debate and concluded: "You hear all that and you can understand why somebody would make a face."
Hours before a new US government report was expected to say Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction or concrete efforts to make them, Bush again argued that the March 2003 invasion to oust the Iraqi leader was necessary.
"There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," he declared. "In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take."
The 1,000-page report by Charles Duelfer, the chief US weapons inspector in Iraq, was expected to say that Saddam had the desire but not the means to make biological, chemical and nuclear arms, according to media reports.
White House officials tried preemptively to claim vindication, even though Bush's public case for war rested on charges that Saddam possessed massive stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and was actively working to build nuclear arms -- allegations now all but abandoned by his top aides.
And while Cheney insisted in his debate with Edwards that Saddam had "an established relationship with Al-Qaeda," another crucial part of the argument for the invasion, the official probe into the September 11, 2001 attacks found no evidence of a collaborative relationship.
Edwards seized on the remark, saying; "Mr Vice President, you are still not being straight with the American people.
"There is no connection between the attacks of September 11 and Saddam Hussein," said the senator from North Carolina. "And you've gone around the country suggesting that there is some connection. There is not."