In a bruising throwback to their 2004 war for the White House exactly one week before US legislative elections, Bush called the comment "insulting and shameful" and Kerry shot back that the charge was "crazy" and based on a "lie."
Kerry had told a college audience on Monday: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
Republicans, worried that the unpopular war in Iraq that has weakened the White House could cost them control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, or both on November 7, gleefully pounced on Kerry's comment to underscore their campaign theme that Democrats are weak on national security.
That led the senator, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, to explain in an exasperated and angry tone on Tuesday that his comments were "a botched joke about the president and the president's people, not about the troops."
"If anybody thinks that a veteran would somehow criticise more than 140,000 troops serving in Iraq and not the president and his people who put them there, they're crazy," he said at a news conference in Seattle, Washington.
"This president and his administration didn't do their homework. They didn't study what would happen in Iraq. They didn't study and listen to the people who were the experts and would have told them. And they know that's what I was talking about yesterday," said Kerry.
Speaking to a raucous Republican rally in this southern state, Bush was having none of it: "The senator's suggestion that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting and it is shameful."
"The members of the United States military are plenty smart, and they are plenty brave, and the senator from Massachusetts owes them an apology," Bush said, as supporters booed Kerry.
"Whatever party you're in, in America, our troops deserve the full support of our government," said the president.
"If anyone owes our troops in the fields an apology, it is the president and his failed team and a Republican majority in the Congress that has been willing to rubber-stamp policies that have done injury to our troops and to their families," Kerry said.
The rhetorical broadsides recalled the bitter rhetoric of their 2004 battle for the White House -- as well as some of Kerry's previous verbal missteps -- even though neither Bush nor the senator are up for reelection.
The White House linked the flap to Kerry's comment, in December 2005, that US soldiers were "terrorising" Iraqi women and children with night-time raids on suspected insurgents. Republicans said this amounted to calling US forces terrorists.
And at least one seasoned observer linked Kerry's latest comment to the remark that some say cost him the White House two years ago, when he defended voting against legislation providing money for the Iraq war by saying "I actually voted for it before I voted against it."
The clumsy phrasing and the indecisiveness it conveyed became a staple of Bush's reelection campaign speeches.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2006