A “BOTCHED joke” by the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee yesterday allowed George Bush to go on the offensive over Iraq for the first time in a midterm election campaign in which anti-war congressional critics had hoped that they could seek revenge against the Administration.

Senator John Kerry spent most of the day refusing to apologise for comments made to a student rally in California on Monday night when he told them that if they did not “study hard . . . and make an effort to be smart you can do well” they would “get stuck in Iraq”.

The White House described the remark as an “absolute insult” to servicemen in Iraq, while veterans’ groups said that the Democrat was “slapping every soldier in the face”. In an apparently co-ordinated onslaught against Mr Kerry, John McCain, the Republican senator, and later Mr Bush, issued ever more strident demands on him to say sorry for “troop bashing”.

But the Massachusetts senator said that it was Mr Bush who should apologise. “My statement yesterday — and the White House knows this full well — was a botched joke about the President and the President’s people, not about the troops.” Yesterday’s row will only have added to the sense of frustration among those Democrats who have spent three years longing to investigate both the case for the Iraq war and the conduct of it.

But Henry Waxman, the senior Democrat on the House Reform Committee, has said that he wants to focus on “waste, fraud and abuse” across the federal Government — especially rebuilding efforts in Iraq — but is unlikely to launch an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the build-up to war.

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