President Bush, who last week admitted to miscalculations over Iraq and blamed the post-war chaos on a "catastrophic success", yesterday admitted that "I don't think you can win" the war on terror, writes Conor O'Clery in New York.
As the Republican National Convention got under way in New York, Mr Bush sought to portray himself as a strong leader.
However, when asked "Can we win?" the war on terror, Mr Bush conceded to NBC News, "I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."
The President's comment gave an opening for vice-presidential candidate Mr John Edwards to denounce the Bush administration's foreign policy, accusing the president of "declaring defeat" and a "failure of leadership".
Bush aides conceded that Mr Bush used a poor choice of words about the war on terror and said that what he meant was that al-Qaeda would never surrender.
"He was talking about winning it in the conventional sense," said White House spokesman Mr Scott McClellan.
"We face an unconventional enemy. I don't think you can expect that there will ever be a formal surrender or a treaty signed, like we have in wars past."
The controversy came as Republican speakers at the four-day convention in Madison Square Garden set out to redefine Mr Bush as the popular leader who rallied the US in the days after September 11th.
In an address to the 5,000 delegates, former New York mayor Mr Rudy Giuliani last night compared Mr Bush to Winston Churchill, saying he was a proven leader unafraid of unpopularity in times of danger.
"Winston Churchill saw the dangers of Hitler when his opponents and much of the press characterised him as a war-mongering gadfly," he said, according to advance excerpts from speech.
"Ronald Reagan saw and described the Soviet Union as 'the evil empire' when world opinion accepted it as inevitable and belittled Ronald Reagan's intelligence. George W. Bush sees world terrorism for the evil that it is and he will remain consistent to the purpose of defeating it while working to make us ever safer at home."
Senator John McCain told delegates that Mr Bush "has been tested and has risen to the most important challenge of our time, and I salute him . . . He has not flinched from the hard choices. He will not yield. And neither will we."
However, in an interview with CNN, Mr McCain said that if re-elected Mr Bush should make national unity his number one priority as he had never seen a "worse, more partisan environment".
He said the Swift Boat advertisements attacking John Kerry's Vietnam combat record, which Mr Bush has refused to specifically condemn, were "so angering to me . . . What are we doing now ripping open those wounds again for a political purpose?"
Democrats seized on Mr Bush's apparent misstep yesterday to take the offensive. Democratic Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, in New York to respond to attacks on the Democratic candidate, told reporters, "This is a president who doesn't believe we can win the war on terror."
Speaking in Wilmington, North Carolina, Senator Edwards criticised Mr Bush's foreign policy, seizing on Mr Bush's comment last week that he made a "miscalculation of what the conditions would be" after US troops went to Iraq.
"The president called it a miscalculation, you can call it anything you want, but the truth is it was a failure of leadership," Mr Edwards said, accusing the administration of creating the conditions for Abu Ghraib, going to war without strong allies, waiting too long to reform intelligence, turning its back on Afghanistan, and standing by while North Korea and Iran advanced their nuclear weapons programs.
Thousands of police imposed tight security on the convention, which Republican National Committee chairman Mr Ed Gillespie opened to a roar of approval by saying: "We will leave here with momentum that will carry us to victory in November."
Former New York mayor Mr Ed Koch, a Democrat, delighted delegates by telling the opening session, "This year, I'm voting for the re-election of President George W. Bush."