Now it's Bush's turn to squirm

"Only Bush was tough enough. Bush, adopting the tone of the fraternity house president he once was, sarcastically derided Kerry: 'No matter how many times Senator Kerry flip-flops, we were right to make America safer by removing Saddam Hussein from power.'
In fact, on the third day of the Republican convention, Kerry had given a penetrating and highly specific speech on the war on terrorism and Iraq, detailing how Bush's strategy amounted to a series of catastrophic blunders. 'When it comes to Iraq,' he said, 'it's not that I would have done one thing differently, I would have done almost everything differently.'
Kerry's speech was pointedly ignored by Bush who, with Cheney, rained a steady fire of ridicule down on Kerry. Meanwhile, the report on Iraq by the Royal Institute of International Affairs was buried in the back pages. 'Iraq could splinter into civil war and destabilise the whole region if the interim government, US forces and United Nations fail to hold the ring among factions struggling for power.' Civil war, the institute said, was 'the most likely outcome'. Kerry remarked that because of Bush's errors 'terrorists have secured havens in Iraq that were not there before'. The New York Times reported that Fallujah and many other cities in the Sunni triangle are under the control of Islamist insurgents. But Bush steadfastly refused to engage Kerry in debate. A report chronicling the undermining of the war against terrorism by James Fallows in The Atlantic, in which numerous military officials described how Afghanistan became a 'sideshow' as resources were siphoned to Iraq, received almost no attention. 'Our strategy is succeeding,' Bush told his jubilant rallies. "