On Iraq war, Senate leader Harry Reid in cross hairs

With a single phrase – "this war is lost" – Sen. Harry Reid has become the most visible antiwar spokesman in Washington.

It's odd placement for one of the rare Democrats who voted for both the first Gulf War and the Iraq war – and, until now, was one of the least quotable politicians in the nation's capital.

An unlikely lightning rod, Senator Reid has raised the stakes in the Iraq debate with his recent comment – and rapidly evolving stance on the war.

As Senate majority leader, he will be a key player in working out a compromise with President Bush over Congress's $124 billion emergency war-funding bill, including a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops. The Senate passed the bill Thursday by a vote of 51 to 46 with all Democrats present voting unanimously.

Earlier this week, Vice President Cheney accused Reid of "defeatism," marking the sharpest break between the Bush administration and Democrats now controlling the Congress.

"So in less than six months' time, Senator Reid has gone from pledging full funding for the military, then full funding with conditions, and then a cutoff of funding. Three positions in five months on the most important foreign policy question facing the nation and our troops," said Mr. Cheney, who is president of the Senate, in an rare news briefing on Capitol Hill to respond to the Democratic leader.

"I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9 percent approval rating," Reid shot back at the same bank of microphones, minutes later. He did, however, call the vice president an "attack dog" twice in the same briefing.

For Reid, the switch from war supporter to leading exit hawk has been swift. The tipping point came during an emotional March 28 visit with wounded soldiers and their families at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

It wasn't his first visit. He'd seen soldiers with missing limbs. What struck him this time were the number out of Iraq with severe head injuries, including a women who had served in the Army for 22 years. She told Reid that she once had been "an expert with numbers," but now couldn't remember her phone number.

Reid's home state of Nevada has lost 27 with coalition forces since the war begin in March 2003, he says. But it's not just the numbers that trouble the senator; it's his conviction that history is repeating itself in Iraq, and that if Congress does not stop this war soon, many more will die to no purpose.

"I remember when President Johnson, trying to save his political legacy, initiated the first of many surges into Vietnam in 1965," he said in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on Monday.

"At this point, the United States had lost a few thousand troops in Vietnam. Following the surges, and by the end of the war, more than 50,000 more were added to that casualty list," he said.

In this speech Reid did not reprise his unscripted claim that the war is "lost." Instead, he talked about what victory in the war on terror might look like. "If we succeed, we can protect our national security, rebuild our battered and betrayed military, and fight a real war on terrorism that drives the terrorists back into the darkest corners, caves, and crevices of human existence. But to win that war, we must choose a new path in Iraq," he said.

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