Lugar on Iraq

You can count me as a longtime skeptic that Republicans will ever abandon Bush on Iraq in substantial numbers come what may, but there's no denying that Dick Lugar took a major step with this statement on the floor.

Still, if the job of a US Senator was fundamentally to make statements, then reasonably sound statements made by Dick Lugar -- along with a lot of centrist Dems like Joe Biden -- before the war would have put us in much better position than we actually found ourselves in. The difficulty is that at the end of the day what a Senator does is cast votes. Will Lugar be there on efforts to restrain Bush's discretion over Iraq policy, or will he still be a functional vote for the Decider? For now, though, we do have a pretty solid speech.

Comments

Lugar is, broadly speaking, a good and reasonable guy, but he always comes up a day late and a dollar short.

If he had been making these speeches when he was the Chairman of the SFRC, maybe it would have had a little more impact, no? But then he would have been a Fulbright and not a Lugar. Also, his lack of any sense of clarity during the Bolton nomination did no credit to him for those on either side of that debate.

Posted by bleh | June 26, 2007 8:56 AM

A Senate seat is a machine which permits a pol the maximum opportunity for empty attitudinizing. Hence the craving.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 26, 2007 10:19 AM

Big deal. It's all well and good he makes this speech now, but he was right there voting with the GOP when the Democrats tried to put the breaks on the very policy Lugar now decries.

That Lugar has been so willing to carry Administration water (see also his halfhearted but nonetheless actual support for John Bolton) is why I didn't vote for him this past election cycle, although I did before. No, I didn't vote for the Libertarian either.

Posted by Gregory | June 26, 2007 12:00 PM

Our government needs to change its course, not continue on with the same ideological path. According to the Borgen Project, we have already spent $340 billion on the Iraq war. Endorsing other campaigns as fruitless as the Iraq war is a mistake.

To really get at the root of national security, global poverty needs to be addressed. The problem isn't terrorism, it's the extreme poverty that people live in that fosters the ideology. Coupled with our foreign policy, no good can come out of it all. If our government really wanted to halt terror, war and genocide, it would spend money on helping lesser-developed nations grow economically. Supporting the Millennium Development Goals to end global poverty would be more beneficial than starting wars all over the Middle East and creating more anti-Western sentiment.

Posted by ellec | June 26, 2007 8:25 PM

"You can count me as a longtime skeptic that Republicans will ever abandon Bush on Iraq in substantial numbers come what may...."

They'll do it when their voters do it in sufficient numbers. Because they want to keep their jobs. And if they don't, then many of them will lose their jobs.

Is there a reason I'm not seeing that it won't work like this?

Posted by Gary Farber | June 27, 2007 2:17 AM