Kerry, a veteran who won five medals for service in the Vietnam War, saluted others on the stage as he stepped to the same podium where Bush spoke on Tuesday. He saluted again as he wrapped up his speech.

Kerry accused the administration of failing to keep faith with the nation's 36 million veterans by underfunding VA programs that leave thousands of former servicemen and women without adequate, timely health care and reduced retirement and disability payments.

"The job will be done when the government stops asking veterans for increased co-payments, enrollment fees and other charges to shift the burden of care to more veterans and drive more than a million veterans out of the system," he said.

But the heart of the speech was a strong attack on Bush's policies in Iraq, delivered at a time when Republicans were midway through a national convention designed largely to stress the president's credentials as an effective commander in chief in the war on terror.

Kerry catalogued what he said was a long list of administration shortcomings on Iraq - failing to heed the advice of senior generals on the number of troops needed for postwar operations, failing to secure the country's borders, failing to share responsibility with NATO or the United Nations, shortchanging the training and equipping of the Iraqi police and more.

As a result, he said, "today's terrorists have secured havens in Iraq that were not there before. And we have been forced to reach accommodation with those who have repeatedly attacked our troops.

"Violence has spread in Iraq. Iran has expanded its influence, and extremism has gained momentum," Kerry said.

The conservative-leaning crowd was mostly silent during Kerry's criticisms of the commander in chief.

Lloyd Woods, a Vietnam war veteran from Caribou, Maine, was skeptical. "If you can believe it, it's a good speech," he said.

But Bob Campbell, an Air Force veteran from Dalton, Ga., who served in Vietnam, said Bush is the one who was hard to believe. He said the president isn't fighting enough for veterans benefits, even though he told the American Legion that he was in Tuesday's speech. He said he "stopped paying attention when he told the fifth lie" and will be supporting Kerry.

As a Massachusetts senator, Kerry voted in 2002 to give Bush the authority to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and said recently that he would still do so in hindsight, even knowing that no weapons of mass destruction have been found.

But Kerry said, "I would never have diverted resources so quickly from Afghanistan," where the Taliban has been forced from power but Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaida remain free.

"I wouldn't have ignored my senior military advisers. I would have made sure that every soldier put in harm's way had the equipment and body armor they needed. I would have built a strong, broad coalition of our allies around the world.

"And if there's one thing I learned from my service, I would never have gone to war without a plan to win the peace," he said.

Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt dismissed Kerry's "claim of consistency," saying, "This is a candidate who voted for the war, voted against the troops, said he was an anti-war candidate, and then said he would make the same vote for the war again."

Kerry's remarks marked his first extensive foray into the controversy that Bush triggered earlier this week. In a television interview aired Monday, the Republican said he wasn't certain the war on terror was winnable. The following day - before the same American Legion members whom Kerry addressed - Bush said it was.

Kerry spoke as the Democratic Party decided to air a new 30-second ad in battleground states, a commercial designed to stress the same points the Massachusetts senator covered. It accuses Bush of "a failure in leadership.""Mounting casualties, costing $200 billion and counting," the ad says. "Now they call it a 'catastrophic success.' They say they 'miscalculated.' And now they say the war on terror is unwinnable."