Fall of the House of Kennedy

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"Uncivil," the president of the United States called it, referring to a statement from Ted Kennedy about how the war in Iraq was nothing but a Republican plot.

For once, George W. Bush has displayed a sense of understatement. His restraint is all the more impressive coming from a Texan. For here is what the senior senator from Massachusetts said about the origins of this war:

"There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. The whole thing was a fraud."

Can this be what Democrats mean by a return to civility in American rhetoric? And if so, how does it differ in any important aspect from plain old McCarthyism, conspiracy theories and all?

Forget the implication that the case for this war was based on Saddam Hussein's being an imminent threat. On the contrary, the president explicitly argued last January that to wait till a threat was imminent in this nuclear -- and biological and chemical -- age would be to wait too long:

"Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late," said George W. Bush, Jan. 28, 2003.

All this talk about whether the threat from Saddam Hussein was imminent is a bright-red herring, The question was whether Saddam should have been stopped before he became an imminent threat, and he has been.

Now the war to secure Iraq after Saddam's regime was toppled must be waged, and won. Or soon enough we'll be back where we started.

The heart of Sen. Kennedy's accusation is his strange description of this war as just a hatched-in-Texas plot. It sounds like something you would hear on al Jazeera, or on one of those tapes attributed to Osama bin Laden. Only it came from an American senator.