Reid attacked

During the Vietnam War, GOP U.S. Sen. George Aiken became a folk hero by proposing that the U.S. declare victory and withdraw.

Nevada’s Sen. Harry Reid is taking some grief for being more candid than that—declaring the Iraq war lost. The dispute produced more than 100 hits on the Google news page by Monday morning, though many of them were repeat hits on the same wire stories or political Web sites such as The Conservative Voice, which ran a story headlined “'Harry Reid: Peddling White Flags.”

The fuss was about this statement by Reid: “I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and—you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows—[know] this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by … extreme violence in Iraq yesterday.”

Defenses of Reid from other Democrats came mostly in the House. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, rebuked Reid: “This is exactly the wrong time to question our strategy in Iraq, or that our new strategy has failed.”

George Bush did not respond directly in a speech on Iraq. Instead, numerous GOP surrogates attacked Reid.