Above the patriotic din.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: The Word from Washington - War on terrorism, United States

As Bush expands the war on terrorism at home and abroad, the Democrats have been falling into line. Leading the pack of Bush supporters in Congress is Senator Joe Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut. Lieberman praised Bush's tough tactics but warned that the war on terrorism would not be over until Saddam Hussein was removed from power.

The former Vice Presidential candidate has been rattling his saber so loudly he actually provoked a counter-rattle from Iraq. "Lieberman is leading a hostile campaign against some Arab countries, and he is provoking others against Iraq, in particular," said an editorial in Al Thawra, the newspaper of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

Lieberman, who is also leading a campaign to become the Democratic Presidential nominee, was unavailable for comment since, his staff told me, he was traveling in Afghanistan. (That ought to send a shiver through the Al Qaeda network.) But his communications director, Dan Gerstein, explained that the Senator was not calling for a military invasion of Iraq. "What he has said is that if we're going to fight a war on terrorism, you can't ignore the world's number-one terrorist," Gerstein said. Shoring up indigenous opposition to Saddam might do the job, Gerstein suggested.

But Lieberman's public stance--including his October 29 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, "After bin Laden, We Must Target Saddam," praising President Bush and calling for widening the war--surely secures his place among Democrats as the biggest hawk on the block.

Not that other Democrats aren't determined to look tough. Let's not forget that every member of Congress with the sole exception of Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, supported the resolution authorizing the use of force to respond to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

So eager are the Dems to avoid comparison with cream puffs, they've left it to former Nixon speechwriter and rightwing pundit William Safire to carry the banner of civil liberties in the face of the Bush Administration's domestic spying operation and secret military trials overseas. Safire commented in a recent column in The New York Times that "most liberal politicians dove under their desks for fear of seeming soft on terror. Not a peep out of Senator Hillary Clinton. Nothing but a wimpish waffle from the Majority Leader, Tom Daschle; and from Joe Lieberman, of all people, came an initial exhortation to try-'em-and-fry-'em that out-Ashcrofted Ashcroft."

Still, there are a few...