THE US presidential race reached a new level of bitterness yesterday after Vice-President Dick Cheney said that victory for John Kerry would make another terror attack on America more likely.

On a day that new claims were published about President Bush’s alleged Vietnam draft dodging and drug use, Iraq again dominated the agenda.

Mr Kerry, the Democrat challenger, accused Mr Bush of misleading the nation into a war that had landed Americans with a $200 billion bill and the “unbearable cost of young American lives”.

Mr Kerry, speaking at the same venue in Cincinnati where Mr Bush laid out his case against Saddam Hussein in October 2002, made by far his most aggressive condemnation of the President’s decisions before and after the war.

Attempting a new campaign strategy of linking Iraq to domestic issues, he called the war a catastrophic choice that had squandered billions of dollars that could have been invested in jobs and healthcare.

But the speech was overshadowed by the incendiary remarks made by Mr Cheney, who warned Americans that if they elected Mr Kerry on November 2, the US would be more vulnerable to attack.

Addressing Republican supporters in Iowa, Mr Cheney said: “If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating.”

He added that if Mr Kerry became President, the country risked falling back into a pre-9/11 mindset where attacks were viewed as criminal acts and “that we’re not really at war”.

Mr Kerry did not directly address Mr Cheney’s attack in yesterday’s speech, although his running mate, John Edwards, said the Vice-President had crossed the line in a way that was “un-American”.

The Massachusetts senator was desperately trying to go on the offensive over Iraq. Despite yesterday’s milestone of 1,000 US deaths, and the failure to find illegal weapons, Mr Bush, with the help of attacks by Mr Kerry’s fellow Vietnam veterans, has been able to shift the debate away from whether the invasion was justified to whether his challenger can be trusted as Commander-in-Chief.

After his speech yesterday, a spokesman for Mr Bush said: “John Kerry voted for the war but voted against funding for combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is another example of John Kerry’s indecision, vacillation and political gamesmanship.”

Mr Bush, however, faces new scrutiny over allegations that he avoided the Vietnam draft and abused drugs.

The Boston Globe claimed yesterday that newly-released documents prove that Mr Bush fell short of his military obligations when serving in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

Ben Barnes, the former Democrat Lieutenant-Governor of Texas, told CBS’s 60 Minutes of his “great shame” when, as Lieutenant-Governor, he secured Mr Bush a coveted place in the state’s Air National Guard. Mr Bush’s father was a Republican congressman at the time.

A new book by the journalist Kitty Kelley also alleges that Mr Bush used cocaine at Camp David during his father’s presidency between 1989 and 1993.

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