PENSACOLA, Aug 10: US President George Bush on Tuesday charged Democrat John Kerry with shifting positions on Iraq as he opened a five-day campaign swing with a bus tour through Republican turf in Florida , the bitterly contested state from the 2000 election.

A crowd estimated at about 10,000 roaring supporters filled the Pensacola Civic Center to hear Mr Bush at this Gulf of Mexico city. He was joined by a sometime rival, Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, who has largely set aside his differences with Mr Bush, who defeated him for their party's nomination in 2000.

The Bush campaign has been pressuring Mr Kerry to say whether he would have still voted for the Iraq war given the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found.

Mr Kerry on Monday said he would have voted to give the president authorization to use force against Iraq "but I would have used that authority effectively". Mr Bush and his aides delighted in the response and said it showed further evidence of Mr Kerry flip-flopping from an anti-war stance he held during the Democratic primary last winter.

"Now, almost two years after he voted for the war in Iraq, and 220 days after switching positions to declare himself the anti-war candidate, my opponent has found a new nuance," Mr Bush said. "He now agrees it was the right decision to go into Iraq."

"After months of questioning my motives, and even my credibility, Senator Kerry now agrees with me that even though we have not found the stockpiles of weapons we all believed were there, knowing everything we know today, he would have voted to go into Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. I want to thank Senator Kerry for clearing that up," Mr Bush said.

Many in the audience were military veterans, who tend to vote Republican. The Kerry campaign says polling data show Florida veterans are starting to move toward the Democrat's side due to the turmoil in Iraq.

Polls show the battle for the state's 27 electoral votes to be a close one, with Mr Bush and Kerry either even or Kerry slightly ahead, and the president is counting on his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, to help repeat his 2000 victory with hopefully a larger margin than the 537-vote advantage with which Mr Bush won after a contentious Supreme Court decision. -Reuters