WASHINGTON – For most Americans, the war Iraq is a harrowing, confusing conflict responsible for more than 1,000 U.S. military deaths. For President Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry, it represents much more as each tries to use Iraq as a prism through which voters will harshly judge their rival.

In their bitterly contested campaign, war is just another way to call the other guy names.

“No matter how many times Senator Kerry flip flops, we were right to make America safer by removing Saddam Hussein from power,” the Republican incumbent said Tuesday. Bush wants voters to see Kerry as indecisive, even dangerous, certain to waffle on national security as well as other issues if he becomes commander in chief.

Kerry, a four-term Massachusetts senator, casts Iraq as one of many ill-conceived Bush decisions that have pushed the nation in the wrong direction. “He chose the date of the start of this war. He chose the moment, and he chose for America to go it alone,” Kerry said. “And today, America is paying this price.”

The presidential candidates traded barbs as the number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq passed 1,000. Kerry immediately issued a statement mourning the deaths, and saying the nation is now obligated to “make the right decisions in Iraq” so that troops can come home as soon as possible.

He didn’t mention Bush in the statement, but Kerry has accused the president of making all the wrong decisions on Iraq, the economy, jobs, health care and other issues.

With word of a record budget deficit projected for this year, the Democrat said, “W stands for wrong – the wrong direction for America”

On Wednesday, Kerry plans to accuse Bush of squandering money in Iraq that could be spent on improving lives in the United States. The next day, he will seize on evidence of rising health insurance premiums to say the Republican incumbent has made the wrong choices on health care. Last week, Kerry said Bush’s bad choices cost Americans hundreds of thousands of jobs.

“The president wants you to re-elect him. For what?” Kerry said Friday. “Losing jobs? Building the biggest deficit in American history?”

By putting his criticism of Bush under one thematic umbrella, Kerry is answering critics in his own party who have been demanding a consistent message from their candidate.

Bush has not had a message problem. Since the day Kerry cemented the Democratic nomination, the president and his GOP allies have picked through the challenger’s 20-year Senate voting record for inconsistencies. From education reform and trade to the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq, the Bush-Cheney campaign found plenty to try to label Kerry a flip-flopper.

The Democrat has lengthy explanations for each GOP-attacked vote or position, but Republicans are betting that voters won’t bother with nuance. Not when a flip-flopping president could hurt the nation.

Why else would Vice President Dick Cheney suggest that voting for Kerry would make the nation vulnerable to terrorist attack?

“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again,” Cheney told an audience in Iowa.

Responded Kerry running mate John Edwards: “Dick Cheney’s scare tactics crossed the line today.”

In this campaign, that line is blurred every day.

Editor’s note: Ron Fournier has covered national politics since 1993.