Cheney versus Reid

There wasn’t much that was edifying about Tuesday’s exchange of barbs between Vice President Cheney and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

The veep used one of his regular visits to Capitol Hill for a highly unusual assault on Reid for suggesting last week that the Iraq war is already “lost.” Cheney did not go so far as former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who has suggested that Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are close to treason with their war rhetoric.

Instead, Cheney impugned Reid’s motives. He said, “I usually avoid press comments when I’m up here but I felt so strongly about what Sen. Reid said … that I thought it was appropriate that I come out today.

“It is cynical to declare that the war is lost because you believe it gives you political advantage. Leaders should make decisions based on the security of our country, not on the interests of their political party.”

But how does the vice president know, even if he disagrees strongly with Reid’s assessment, that the majority leader was motivated by cynical partisan concerns? If Reid believes the war is lost and that American lives are being lost pointlessly in Iraq, it is not cynical to attempt to stop it.

Reid’s response was to follow Cheney down the low road whilst, amusingly, suggesting that he was doing the opposite. “I’m not going to get into a name-calling match,” he declared, “with the administration’s chief attack dog.”

I’m not going to call you names, you attack dog — hmm, maybe Reid was joking. But then his office issued a statement in which he suggested Cheney’s assault was an act of desperation when, in truth, there are many Democrats who feel Reid has put them on the defensive and wish he had not, once again, taken his rhetoric too far.

Just as Cheney cannot know that Reid’s comments were motivated by partisan cynicism, so Reid cannot confidently suggest that Cheney’s blast was empty name-calling rather than a determined effort to repudiate comments that he genuinely believes will encourage the enemy and discourage American forces.

The exchange, of course, underlines the fact that Iraq and the war on Islamist terror has become the defining issue of the times, coloring all debate, poisoning too many exchanges and cleaving the political establishment just as it cleaves the country.