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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, on Monday launched a withering election-year attack on President Bush's domestic agenda and again blasted him over his handling of Iraq.
"Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam," Kennedy declared in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a think tank.
Kennedy's speech drew a stern rebuke from the Senate majority whip, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who took to the Senate floor to denounce Kennedy's remarks as "vicious" and "outrageous."
Kennedy, the Senate's most pre-eminent liberal voice, repeated earlier assertions that Bush led the United States into the Iraq war on false pretenses and that the continuing conflict there has distracted the nation's attention away from what Kennedy sees as the real war on terrorism.
"President Bush gave al Qaeda two years ... to regroup and recover in the border regions of Afghanistan," Kennedy said, talking about the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden. "As the terrorist bombings in Madrid and other reports now indicate, al Qaeda has used that time to plant terrorist cells in countries throughout the world, and establish ties with terrorist groups in many different lands."
The Bush administration has said many times that more than 70 percent of al Qaeda's leadership has been killed or captured and that the terrorist network is on the run.
McConnell, a Republican, said only al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001.
"We need to focus on rooting out global terrorism by fighting the terrorists and not each other," McConnell said.
Kennedy charged the Bush administration with a lack of candor about the threat that Saddam Hussein posed, and said that mindset has carried over to its domestic agenda.
"Saying whatever it takes to prevail has become standard operating procedure procedure in the Bush White House," he said. "In this administration, truth is the first casualty of policy."
