DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

Unpopular wars aren't born, they're made. They spring from the government's womb popular and inspiring. As time goes on the public learns more about the war's origins and disillusionment sets in, but that's not enough to sour the public, and politicians don't respond until long after the public sours.

First, opposition to a war has to reach a sort of critical mass. In Vietnam it happened after the Tet offensive when, after three years of war, U.S. forces found themselves under siege all across Vietnam, suggesting that the long hoped-for end of the war was nowhere in sight. For the first time, more than half of the U.S. public started telling opinion pollsters they opposed the war.

Korea was even more unpopular. Vietnam scholar Loren Chan, noting that opinion surveys showed that up to 62 percent of the public opposed the Korean war, says the difference between the two wars was that Vietnam critics "took to the streets" while Korean war opponents remained silent. And instead of a single event like Tet crystallizing opposition, unhappiness grew month by month from June 1950 until the 1952 election, by which time battlefield stalemate had settled in and it was a major presidential campaign issue.

That is closer to the template for the current disenchantment with the Iraq war, and Sunday's New York Times suggested a turning point in the evolution toward critical mass. The newspaper, whose gullible reporting and unquestioning news coverage helped the Bush administration create war fever and launch the war on Iraq, finally changed its stance and ran a 1,721 war editorial calling for an end to the war. That was deep inside the newspaper. On page one was a story about U.S. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the leader of Senate Democrats: "Sensing a Shift, Reid Will Press For an Iraq Exit."

The Times described the Nevadan as "a onetime moderate who has evolved into one of the party's most fervent critics of the war" and said Reid now sees "ending the war as a moral duty."

"May the 37 percent see the pain and suffering I have seen at Walter Reed," Reid said of those who support the Bush war policy.

Sen. Reid's outrage is unearned. Few members of Congress have been more willing to use weapons of war to enforce U.S. policies, more tolerant of presidents' military adventures, or less protective of Congress's war-making prerogatives. He was the first Democrat to volunteer his support for the first Iraq war. He has seldom objected to presidential invasions of places like Grenada and Panama.

Two days before the senate voted on authorizing war on Iraq in 2003, Reid gave a speech in which he listed his misgivings about putting such power in George Bush's hands.

He said it was the role of Congress to "halt or prevent an unjust or unwise conflict." He questioned the idea of using U.S. power against an Iraq enfeebled by the first war and by sanctions. He said Bush had not pursued diplomatic solutions, telling Bush, "We have not enlisted, as your father did so magnificently, the whole world to fight by our side...We have not yet convinced our people or the world that international law is on our side."

Then Reid said he would vote for war, that he would trust Bush to show restraint (even though Bush had very publicly been straining at the leash for weeks): "But I am also voting you this power secure in the knowledge that no president of the United States ... will take this nation to war as a first resort alternative rather than as a last resort."

Reid did not condition his vote on proof of the weapons of mass destruction. His speech took it as given that they existed. It wasn't just newspapers that were gullible.

And as recently as ten weeks ago, Reid was telling Steve Sebelius of Las Vegas City Life, "That was an easy vote for me...If I had those facts [the claims of WMD, not necessarily universally regarded as facts] and I didn't know what I know now, I'd have done the same thing."

But it's precisely because Reid is so often willing to go to war and so reluctant to rein in presidential recklessness that his new talk of stopping the Iraq war as a "moral duty" is such a powerful straw in the wind. This is starting to feel like critical mass.