Social Econ Blog

It has been weird watching the sudden and rapid erosion of support for them. Iraq War among Washington insiders. Even though a majority of Americans have favored change in our Iraq policy for months, the position continued to be treated as outside the mainstream. For some reason, the cost of admiting the obvious (that staying the course was insane) was substantially higher for the chattering and political classes than for much of the rest of the country. Suddenly, though, it has become very cheap.

How cheap?

Republican senators are willing to get up on the floor of the senate and do this:

In an emotional speech on the Senate floor Thursday night, Sen Gordon Smith, a moderate Republican from Oregon who has been a supporter of the war in Iraq, said the U.S. military's "tactics have failed" and he "cannot support that anymore."

Smith said he is at, "the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up the same bombs, day after day.

"That is absurd," he said. "It may even be criminal."

Smith said he has tried to quietly support President Bush during the course of the war -- and doesn't believe the president intentionally lied to get the U.S. into the war -- but now recognizes, "we have paid a price in blood and treasure that is beyond calculation" for a war waged due to bad intelligence.

Moved this week by the findings of the Iraq Study Group, Smith said he needed to "speak from my heart.

"I, for one, am tired of paying the price of 10 or more of our troops dying a day. So let's cut and run or cut and walk, but let us fight the way on terror more intelligently that we have because we have fought this war in a very lamentable way," he said.