LEWISTON – Democrats can be hawks, too.

That was the message John Edwards delivered Sunday to an estimated crowd of more than 2,500 people packed into the Lewiston Armory against a backdrop of banners that read: “Fighting For Us.”

Edwards, the son of North Carolina mill workers and one himself for a time, visited this mill town for the first time. The Twin Cities is considered the Democratic stronghold of the closely divided 2nd Congressional District and a bellwether region for the presidential race in Maine.

Rather than focusing on the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs in Maine, including this city, the vice presidential candidate used harsh rhetoric during a half-hour speech about making America safe from ill-conceived wars and terrorists who might target the United States.

“When John Kerry is president, when I am your vice president, we will find the al-Qaida,” he said. “We will find these terrorists … and we will crush them before they can do any more harm to the American people.”

The Kerry-Edwards campaign has stepped up its criticism of the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror and the Iraq war after President Bush sought to define the issue as central to his re-election strategy.

Fighting back against Republican attacks aimed at casting doubt on Kerry’s fitness as a potential commander-in-chief, including many allusions to Sept. 11, Edwards urged voters not to believe it.

“This is an effort to exploit one of the greatest tragedies in American history … and it’s wrong,” he said. “The reason it is wrong is that John Kerry and I are completely committed to winning the war on terrorism.”

The Bush campaign is seeking to divide Americans on an issue that is not – nor should be viewed as – partisan, he said.

The war on terrorism has been a casualty of the Iraq war, Edwards said. Instead, U.S. troops should return to the anti-terrorist activities in Afghanistan and hunt down al-Qaida leadership, including Osama bin Laden.

He also was critical of the Bush administration and GOP-controlled Congress for their foot-dragging over the restructuring of the intelligence bureaucracy in the wake of 9/11 Commission’s recommendations.

“We need to make sure we have the kind of intelligence operations that give us the information we need to keep this country safe, which means … not waiting to do it, not doing it piecemeal, but doing it immediately.”

A safer world requires:

• Working to infiltrate terrorists cells.

• Eliminating “loose nukes” in the former Soviet Union.

• Stopping Iran from starting to build nuclear weapons.

• Confronting the “growing” military threat from North Korea.

Americans also need a stronger defense on home soil, he said.

Currently, only up to 4 percent of the thousands of containers that are shipped into U.S. ports every day are inspected for weapons of mass destruction, presenting “an enormous threat to us.”

Chemical and nuclear power plants, among “the most vulnerable targets” here, need to be secured, he said. More funding is needed or frontline emergency workers, such as firefighters, law enforcement officers and emergency medical technicians.

The war in Iraq is a failure, he said.

“The reality is Iraq is a mess and it’s a mess because of two men: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney,” he said. “They said they had a plan. Not true. They told us that we had the troops necessary to secure Iraq. Not true. They told us, remember this, that the war would pay for itself. Not true.”

He said the war has cost more than $200 billion and the price grows every minute while the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq grows greater with each succeeding month. Iraq now has become a “haven” for terrorists, he said. Bush has alienated our allies and taunted our enemies.

Bush and Cheney “have no plan,” he said; the Kerry-Edwards ticket does.

Its plan includes:

• Reforming strong foreign alliances to assist with securing peace.

• Recruiting other countries to assist with reconstruction efforts.

• Speeding up the training of Iraqi peacekeeping forces.

Despite Bush’s optimism about Iraq’s outlook, Edwards cited recent statements by Republican senators and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who reportedly conceded that the United States was losing the war.

Bush and Cheney are “the only two people left in American who think things are going well in Iraq,” Edwards said. “These people are so out of touch with reality.”

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