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President George W. Bush, trying to assure Americans he has made them safer since the Sept. 11 attacks and help his party in the congressional elections, addresses a nation tonight that has grown sceptical of the Iraq war and its link to the fight against terrorism.

Bush's prime-time speech caps two days of remembrance ceremonies in New York, at the Pentagon and in the Pennsylvania field where one of the four airliners hijacked by a group of al-Qaeda terrorists crashed.

While Bush and his aides insist tonight's address isn't political, the politics of national security -- including the conflict in Iraq and the battle against terrorism - are inescapable as the president's party fights to hold its congressional majority in the November elections by emphasizing the issue to voters.

Vice President Dick Cheney voiced that theme yesterday. He argued that the Bush administration had made significant progress in pacifying Iraq and confronting terrorists and placed blame for faulty pre-war intelligence about Iraq's weapons capabilities squarely on then-CIA Director George Tenet.

“Just think of what's at stake in this election in terms of national security and the global war on terror,” Cheney said in an hour-long interview on NBC's “Meet the Press” programme.

He cited the debate over keeping US troops in Iraq, saying it raises doubts among allies whether “the United States, in fact, is going to be there to complete the mission”.

The suggestion that the US should withdraw “validates the strategy of the terrorists” of trying to break America's will to continue a long fight.

As part of the commemoration of Sept. 11, Bush laid a wreath at Ground Zero in New York yesterday. It was the first of 10 appearances at sites connected to the attacks that killed almost 3 000 people when terrorists hijacked passenger jets and aimed them at New York's World Trade Center and targets in the nation's capital.

This morning, the president and First Lady Laura Bush had breakfast with about 100 New York City firefighters and police at a firehouse in lower Manhattan that was among the first to respond to the disaster. The station lost one person, Chief Matthew Ryan, and one of its fire trucks was crushed.

The couple then participated in a ceremony and moments of silence outside the firehouse to mark the times planes struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. While listening to renditions of “Amazing Grace”, “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America”, the Bushes stood near a door from Ladder 18, a fire truck destroyed in the collapse of the towers.

The president and his wife fly next to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to participate in a ceremony where United Air Lines flight 93 crashed after passengers overpowered terrorists steering the plane toward Washington. They then return to Washington for a ceremony at the Pentagon.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, most polls showed Bush had the almost unanimous backing of Americans for his handling of the crisis and the steps the US was taking in the war on terrorism. Now the administration is struggling to regain public support in the face of an unpopular conflict in Iraq, the government's failure to chase down Osama bin Laden and questions from members of Congress about some of the tactics used to prosecute the war.

While tonight's speech won't be an attempt to argue the case for Iraq, the president won't shy away from linking that conflict with the war on terrorism, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said as the president prepared to depart for New York.

“There will be some of that, but there will be much more on what lessons we've learned from Sept. 11, and where we are as a nation,” Snow said.

Cheney dismissed polls that show most Americans think the war in Iraq has created more terrorists, that the invasion was a mistake and Iraq isn't the central front on terrorism, as the Bush administration maintains.

The vice president defended the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, saying there was widespread acceptance of the intelligence supporting the original rationale for the war: that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and might share them with terrorists.

“It was the intelligence all of us believed,” Cheney said. He cited assurances from Tenet and the fact that President Bill Clinton during his administration also thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

That information turned out to be wrong. Two reports released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee said that Bush administration claims justifying the war were based on intelligence that was fragmented, conflicting, and at times unreliable.

In other years, Bush's observances of the national tragedy have been more muted. On Sept. 11, 2003, he delivered brief remarks at a church service, and during his 2004 re-election campaign he used the anniversary to highlight gains in the war against terror. Last year, he observed a moment of silence at the White House.

Bush will speak for 15 to 20 minutes at 9 p.m. Washington time, the prime television viewing time for U.S. audiences. Snow said administration officials decided the president would have to address the Sept. 11 anniversary as part of a series of speeches, given over the last week, on the threat of terrorism and the war in Iraq.

“From the early planning meetings, we saw, in general, an understanding that it was important to talk about both the war in Iraq and the war on terror,” Snow said in an interview. “We didn't think all the facts were getting out, and so we made a decision to start talking about them.”

Republican political consultant Rich Galen said Bush can't escape the political implications of tonight's speech, even if none are intended. If the anniversary fell May or June, “no one would raise an eyebrow”, he said.

“He's kind of damned if he does, damned if he doesn't,” Galen said. “The fact that this is happening in September of a very close election year obviously gives this a different slant.”

Democrats directly accuse the administration of trying to politicize national security and the war on terrorism, even as they try to use the issue, and the war in Iraq, against Republicans.

“We have not pursued the war on terror with the vigour that we should have because we've gotten bogged down in this civil war in Iraq,'' said Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean yesterday on “Fox News Sunday”.

“Osama bin Laden has not been captured five years later. That's a big problem.”

Dean said the president's recent speeches show that Republicans think they can't win the elections unless they talk about terrorism all the time”.

Said Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who lost to Bush in the 2004 election, in an interview on CNN: “There's a simple test here: Are there more terrorists in the world today than before 9/11 who want to kill Americans? The answer is, yes.”

Karl Rove, Bush's top political aide, said in a January speech that Republicans would try to run on combating terrorism.

That is the issue on which Bush got his highest approval rating from voters -- 53 percent -- in a Sept. 5-7 ABC News poll even as his overall approval rating was 42 percent. The poll found 46 percent say they have a great deal or a good amount of confidence in the government to prevent another terrorist attack and 53 percent said that had only a fair amount or none.

“Bush may find out that this is not a winning issue come November,'' said Stephen Hess a government professor at George Washington University and presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “But at this point, it's about all he has left.”

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